- Oxford Nanopore’s long-promised portable DNA sequencers are finally shipping, moving the device from rumored vaporware to a real tool for field genomics and open-source biohacking.  
- A crowdfunded Azolla fern genome project on experiment.com is criticized as likely to waste funds on “ineffective sequencing,” highlighting skepticism about crowdfunding-driven science.  
- Participants dissect global pharma pricing: Europe’s monopsony buying and India’s patent-ignoring generic factories shift R&D costs onto U.S. consumers, framing drug access as a geopolitical issue.  
- A PDMS microfluidic chip that uses off-the-shelf Braille-pin actuators as micro-valves is proposed for low-cost lab automation (MDPI Micromachines 2013, 4, 80).  
- The “Mycelium Entropy” USB dongle printer generates and prints Bitcoin paper wallets, adding a new open-hardware option for cold-storage cryptocurrency security.  
- Black Hat USA 2014 talk “You Don’t Have to Be the NSA to Break Tor” and the leaked XKeyscore ruleset (xkeyscorerules100.txt) are circulated, illustrating low-cost Tor deanonymization and NSA deep-packet inspection signatures.  
- A Boston University BSL-4 lab walkthrough video details vaporized hydrogen-peroxide and formaldehyde sterilization, epoxy-coated walls, and other containment protocols useful for both institutional and DIY high-containment work.  
- Vaporized formaldehyde is discussed as a dual-use sterilization method for everything from anthrax-contaminated textile mills to routine tissue-culture hoods, bridging biosecurity and everyday lab safety.  
- Ongoing access to a focused-ion-beam (FIB) system is reported, with experiments at varying magnifications and power levels, showing the DIY community’s direct engagement with nanofabrication.  
- The Science paper on “metre-scale single-crystal graphene on industrial Cu foil” (DOI: 10.1126/science.1254432) is retrieved, underscoring interest in scalable 2-D materials for electronics and bio-interfaces.