- A user outlined an open-source, low-cost approach to building a high-vacuum chamber capable of 10⁻⁴ Torr using stacked steel laminate plates compressed with bolts and vacuum grease, shaped as a long triangular prism of trapezoidal segments.  
- The same user asked for practical advice on how to bring electrical wiring and gas nozzles through the chamber walls without compromising the vacuum.  
- Discussion of bandwidth pricing surfaced a claim of “$160/mo for 12 TB on 800 Mbps” somewhere outside the U.S., with Cogent cited as the cheapest U.S. option at “slightly under $5/Mbps.”  
- Paperbot delivered two electrochemical-vapor-deposition papers on demand: one on low-temperature metal-nitride deposition from organometallics and another on low-temperature silicon-nitride LPCVD using bis(tertiary-butylamino)silane.  
- A brief exchange explored the semantics of Bitcoin “laundering,” distinguishing between merely obfuscating transaction history and concealing illicit sources.  
- SciCombinator (scicombinator.com) was mentioned as a new aggregator for scientific papers, though criticized for relying on the Disqus commenting platform.  
- Participants debated the merits and lock-in risks of Disqus, noting that site admins can export comments as XML for migration to other systems.  
- When asked for a “GitHub for science,” kanzure listed ShareLaTeX for real-time collaborative LaTeX editing and Figshare for data publication, while pointing out that most “GitHub-for-X” science sites lack actual Git repositories.