- A ready-to-use bill-of-materials for a small post-PCR genomics lab targeting the 4 GB Bidens pilosa genome was shared at http://diyhpl.us/skdb/BOMs/diybio-equipment.yaml; achieving adequate coverage is estimated to require one Illumina HiSeq lane (~US$3 550 including library prep), and outsourcing to core facilities (e.g., UC Davis, Axeq) is currently far cheaper than building an in-house platform.  
- Patent restrictions on Illumina chemistry were identified as the primary obstacle preventing sub-$1 000 genome sequencing, reinforcing the community’s focus on open-source alternatives.  
- Vicarious AI announced it has passed the first “Turing-test” CAPTCHA challenge (http://vicariousinc.tumblr.com/post/65316134613/vicarious-ai-passes-first-turing-test-captcha), prompting brief discussion on the implications for automated vision systems.  
- Troubleshooting of the python-brlcad wrapper revealed that the Gentoo package omits libbrep.so (boundary-representation curves library); the issue was filed as GitHub issue #2 and may require upstream packaging fixes.  
- Developers compared OpenCASCADE bindings: the existing pythonocc project was judged to provide only thin SWIG wrappers, whereas earlier SKDB code (http://diyhpl.us/cgit/skdb/tree/geom/geom.py) offers a more “pythonic” geometry interface.  
- A lightweight Python solution for normalizing user-generated tool names (e.g., “12” vs “twelve”) was debated; consensus favored constraining input to pre-validated choices rather than open-ended NLP parsing.  
- Paperbot liberated several paywalled articles, including Nature Neuroscience papers on retinal direction selectivity (DOIs 10.1038/nn.3565, 10.1038/nn.3547), a Nature Medicine piece (10.1038/nm.2297), and the total synthesis of (+)-lysergic acid (J. Org. Chem. 10.1021/jo4018777).  
- A Nature paper (PMID 19829295, DOI 10.1038/nature08514) was retrieved via LibGen, indicating ongoing interest in high-impact bioscience literature within the channel.  
- The only explicit technical query of the session was a request for the “recent Photoshop source-code dump,” highlighting the community’s habit of tracking and archiving leaked or open-sourced proprietary tools for reverse-engineering or creative hacking purposes.