- A DIY 3-D-printable Raspberry Pi Raman spectrometer is being iterated; the current bill of materials is ~$500 once $200 Raman notch/cliff filters are added, and the developer is weighing a switch from a Parallax Propeller to an LPC-Link-V2 for USB control.  
- Participants derived the drug wash-out time formula t = –half-life × log(N/initial)/log(2) and emphasized that gene-expression changes may persist long after plasma concentration falls.  
- Reverse-engineering of consumer biosensors was detailed: the Emotiv EEG headset uses a non-Bluetooth RF protocol and has open Python/C USB-dongle code; for Bluetooth devices like the SCiO spectrometer, hooking Android/iOS APIs or decompiling companion apps is more practical than SDR sniffing because of pairing and encryption.  
- A Novozymes enzyme-design meetup revealed that the $10 B company couples high-throughput sequencing with directed evolution in GRAS organisms, but synthesis throughput—not sequencing—is the current bottleneck.  
- A patent-reform proposal circulated on the open-manufacturing list suggests treating patents as taxable property and replacing infringement liability with a compulsory licensing fee to reduce patent warfare while preserving attribution.  
- The channel’s paperbot liberated paywalled Springer, Wiley, and Annual Reviews articles, exposing a libgen Windows-backend bottleneck and reinforcing the group’s commitment to open-access literature.  
- Mechanical-logic demonstrations—pulley-based AND/OR gates and a domino half-adder—were shared as tangible educational tools for computer-science fundamentals.