• A proposal for an open-source bioinformatics toolkit aims to unify public genomics data (ChIP-seq, RNA-seq, etc.) and create a non-redundant, cross-referenced gene annotation layer that reconciles aliases across Ensembl, NCBI, Vega, and other major databases.  
• Participants debated whether the project should instead clone the commercial Geneious suite, concluding that existing tools are too heavyweight and still fail to solve the cross-annotation problem.  
• juri_, maintainer of GNU GIFT, described a new web interface that wraps the legacy GIFT engine so non-programmers can apply Gabor, Hough, and MSER transforms for automated cell counting on microscope images.  
• The group sketched a low-cost DIY cell counter built from a microscope plus camera, extending the concept to a “fundamentally simple” open-source flow cytometer.  
• kanzure circulated an open-source Bitcoin ATM design (https://github.com/mayosmith/openbitcoinatm) and highlighted a Boing Boing article on high-end CNC mills that use GPS/gyro sensors to lock themselves down if moved without permission, sparking discussion on hardware DRM.  
• delinquentme shared a Science Translational Medicine paper on a new therapeutic approach (doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.3006870) and floated a “data-wrangling-as-a-service” startup that would farm standardization tasks to distributed low-cost labor with diff-based quality control.  
• The channel maintains paperbot, an IRC bot that resolves paywalled DOIs to libgen mirrors; its public GitHub repo (https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot) allows anyone to run their own instance.