• ParahSailin has reverse-engineered Illumina’s proprietary BCL (base-call) format and is developing an open-source de-indexer to convert BCL files into standard FASTQ, removing a major barrier to open next-generation-sequencing pipelines.  
• The community is exploring names for an open-source replacement of Illumina’s CASAVA pipeline, with playful acronyms like “POTATO” and “ABAMA” floated as placeholders.  
• A GitHub trollbot was reported that automatically files sexism accusations against commits containing the substring “his” and demands 0.01 BTC to close the issue; the account was banned after a support ticket was filed.  
• kanzure shared a UC San Diego physics article titled “Economist Meets Physicist,” which examines thermodynamic limits to economic growth and energy constraints on future technological expansion.  
• heath introduced the “Pants” build system via a concise tutorial (https://gist.github.com/wickman/2371638) to promote reproducible build tooling in bioinformatics projects.  
• ruphos provided an open-access mirror (http://biofag.com/files/nphoton.2013.350.pdf) for the Nature Photonics paper on high-speed optical neural interfaces.  
• Crawlera (http://crawlera.com/) was recommended as a proxy service to improve the reliability of “paperbot,” an automated tool for retrieving academic papers, while the absence of “gradstudentbot” was noted as a gap in open-source literature-fetching agents.