- A participant suffering from wrist RSI sparked discussion about open-source prosthetics, with the half-joking request that “someone needs to print me a new wrist + forearm” so they can keep coding.  
- Practical RSI mitigation tips were exchanged: remapping Caps Lock to Control/Escape, switching to low-force laptop keyboards, and using high-resistance “Captain Crush” hand grippers to strengthen tendons.  
- ParaSa1lin questioned the simplicity of a patent claiming to confer nitrogen-fixation capability to non-legumes via the bacterium *Acetobacter diazotrophicus* and asked whether any university labs could supply the organism.  
- kanzure and others dissected the NSA’s alleged sabotage of the Dual_EC_DRBG random-number generator, citing evidence that secret constants in the NIST spec allow prediction of its output after only 32 bytes.  
- A Tor mailing-list reply was highlighted suggesting that NSA ciphers may not be cryptographically broken but are “deliberately hard to implement correctly,” increasing the likelihood of exploitable bugs.  
- abetusk reported from the 2013 Open Hardware Summit on the “DropBot,” an open-source microfluidic platform (Ryan Fobel et al., Univ. Toronto) capable of digital droplet control for lab-on-a-chip applications.  
- kanzure showcased ongoing work on a streaming rewrite of paperbot using Node.js modules (trumpet, duplexer, hyperquest) to parse pay-walled HTML on the fly and return open-access PDFs via LibGen.  
- heath introduced Disco, a lightweight MapReduce framework written in Erlang and Python, as an alternative to Hadoop for distributed computation tasks.