- DirtyPCBs.com was highlighted as an ultra-low-cost PCB prototyping service, offering ten 5 × 5 cm boards for $12 and ten 10 × 10 cm boards for $24 under the slogan “No bull, just crappy PCBs.”

- Sequencing every U.S. cancer patient bi-weekly for one year would generate ~495 exabytes, while sequencing every U.S. resident once per year would yield ~313 exabytes, illustrating the scale of the impending genomic data-storage crisis.

- Conference speakers argued that ~10,000 genomes are required to extract statistically meaningful information from a single individual’s genome and predicted that pre-cancer sequencing plus cell-free DNA monitoring will be essential for early detection.

- A new field dubbed “Literomics” was introduced, referring to computational analysis of scientific literature, with Microsoft-backed tools such as Literome, SNAP, and the Big Data Genomics stack showcased as examples.

- 23andMe’s VP of business development appeared at the conference, prompting discussion that the company now sells only ancestry and heredity reports after FDA restrictions barred it from returning medical-risk interpretations.

- A heated debate questioned the clinical payoff of large-scale cancer genome sequencing: critics labeled it “epistemically bankrupt charlatanry,” while supporters contended that cost, not flawed theory, is the limiting factor.

- RNA sequencing of blood or tumor samples was proposed as a faster and more comprehensive alternative to traditional pathogen panels for identifying viral or bacterial infections in clinical settings.

- The Broad Institute and Intel released new GATK builds that leverage Intel IPP, AVX vector instructions, and parallelization to accelerate genomic variant calling, although channel participants criticized GATK as “awful,” Java-based, and hard to install.

- Sequencing the full diversity of human cancers was estimated to require ~14,000 patients per cancer subtype for 1 % statistical confidence across ~450 subtypes, implying ~475 exabytes of data—enough spinning-disk storage to cover six football fields stacked ten stories high and powered by a dedicated nuclear plant—yet raw sequencing costs were projected at only ~$50 million.