- A European research consortium publicly called on Elsevier to withdraw its restrictive text-and-data-mining (TDM) policy, framing open access to scholarly literature as essential for computational science and innovation.  
- The channel mocked a start-up that raised $6 M merely to render 23andMe reports for physicians, highlighting skepticism toward superficial “genomics-as-a-service” plays.  
- Participants debated the practicalities of PDMS swelling in solvents, concluding that predictable volumetric expansion can be engineered around by leaving extra channel space in microfluidic designs.  
- A live-coding music session using the Overtone toolkit (Clojure + SuperCollider) sparked discussion on improving real-time algorithmic composition, with suggestions to treat an IRC channel as a collaborative REPL front-end.  
- Rust’s ownership model was praised, yet one user rolled a custom linked-list implementation after finding the standard vector API cumbersome, prompting push-back on whether linked lists are idiomatic in Rust.  
- A neuroscience paper on “neural crash warning signals” during experimental market bubbles was circulated, illustrating interest in neuroeconomics and biomarkers of collective irrationality.  
- Deb.js, a minimalist JavaScript debugging utility, was briefly showcased as an example of lightweight tooling for rapid web prototyping.  
- TiMidity++ was introduced as a software MIDI synthesizer for headless audio generation, relevant to low-cost music hacking and embedded sound projects.