• Neuromorphic hardware debate: participants compared IBM’s TrueNorth (1 M neurons, ~$200 k for octopus-scale system), the CogniMem CM1K neural-network chip, and Stanford’s flexible NeuroGrid platform, while questioning whether commodity CPUs, GPUs, or power-efficient FPGAs are best for large-scale brain simulations and coupled PDEs.

• DIY vs. commercial Soylent: the open “Hacker-School” recipe was praised for transparency but criticized for excess sugar and missing magnesium; the $85/21-serving commercial product was seen as a betrayal of the original open-source ethos, with 10–12-week shipping delays and proprietary formulation.

• Field-portable chemical sensing: Raman spectroscopy (SPIE’s 2-lb TRicorder-0, Ben Krasnow’s DIY HeNe setup) and Spatially Offset Raman Spectroscopy (SORS) were discussed as open alternatives to TellSpec’s switch to TI DLP-based NIR, with calls for a USB-key Raman sensor that plugs into phones via OTG.

• Open-source UAV stack: ArduPilot fixed-wing autopilot, 3DR-radio telemetry, and SiK radio firmware on GitHub were shared as low-cost drone data-link solutions.

• Early-mining automation: a system that scrapes bitcointalk.org, auto-clones new alt-coin forks, patches them, and spins up EC2 instances within 2–5 minutes of launch was described, along with economic trade-offs of difficulty spikes and fork competition.

• Brain imaging with optical coherence tomography: recent mouse experiments using transparent zirconia cranial windows enable 3-D OCT imaging of cortical vasculature with ~1–2 mm penetration depth.

• Molecular visualization tools: Chemissian, MacMolPlt, Molden, VENUS, AMRVis, and Vrui-based VR viewers were compared for rendering electron densities from GAMESS or X-ray data, while the 1998 EVolVis program for charge-density mapping was noted as missing from the web.

• Security and attestation: a paper on “Towards Provably Secure Software Attestation” was linked as a potential building block for trustworthy open-source hardware/firmware stacks.