• A newly published Physical Review Letters paper describes an acoustic tractor beam that can pull objects toward the source, contrasting with optical tweezers that only supply lateral forces; earlier 2012 work achieved a similar effect with dual Bessel laser beams.

• Participants outlined a plan to liberate the 300 Zotero translators from the Firefox/Zotero stack, port the subset that target academic repositories, and still let Zotero’s 200 k users feed improvements back into an open-source archiving tool.

• TrueCrypt’s sudden shutdown sparked debate: no critical bug had been found (only the stage-1 bootloader audit was complete), but the license change now enables community forks and continuation of the pending stage-2 audit.

• An experimental antibiotic strategy was proposed: inhibit bacterial protein kinases involved in infection, analogous to BRAF-targeted cancer drugs, with side discussion of insect tissue culture versus yeast or phage therapy for cheap protein production.

• The FDA’s $45 million “application fee” granted URL Pharma exclusive rights to the ancient gout drug colchicine (Colcrys), instantly raising the price from <$0.10 to ~$5 per pill—cited as textbook regulatory capture and a barrier to low-cost drug development.

• DIY bio activity reported: culturing Lactobacillus from a commercial probiotic using simple incubator-based colony counting instead of viability dyes, illustrating low-cost microbiology techniques.

• Extensive discussion on circumventing journal paywalls: startups and small firms rely on interns, students, and informal PDF sharing; SPARC is collecting testimony for U.S. policymakers, and participants explored large-scale university boycotts of subscription journals.

• Lost NASA NTRS reports: thousands of public-domain NASA technical reports disappeared after an ITAR scare; BlackPhoenix reportedly holds the most complete mirror, and archive.org will accept uploads but may “dark” them if abuse complaints arise.

• CAD workflow frustrations with BRL-CAD (cryptic command syntax, need to write C for basic operations) led to suggestions of using qcad for 2-D DXF sketches and PythonOCC/OpenCASCADE as more script-friendly alternatives.

• Archive.org policy clarified: “darked” (publicly inaccessible) content is still preserved; robots.txt at crawl-time versus current robots.txt determines Wayback visibility, and darked material can become public again if domains lapse or robots.txt changes.