- Emerald Cloud Lab (emeraldcloudlab.com) was presented as a fully-remote wet-lab service that allows users to design and execute life-science experiments via the web; participants debated the extent to which the pipeline is truly robotic versus still reliant on human technicians.  
- A PNAS paper on acoustophoretic contactless transport was circulated, highlighting how acoustic levitation could enable sterile or micro-gravity manipulation of biological samples without physical contact.  
- The EmDrive and Guido Fetta’s propellant-less microwave thruster were discussed after NASA Eagleworks reportedly measured ~720 mN of thrust; skeptics warned that magnetic damping and mechanical artifacts in the torsion-pendulum setup could explain the apparent force.  
- Paperbot was repeatedly used to fetch pay-walled articles, including a Nature Nanotechnology piece (doi:10.1038/nnano.2014.154) and a BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics paper (medethics-2013-101692), demonstrating the channel’s practice of rapid open-access mirroring at diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/paperbot.  
- The “DIY transhumanist declaration” (diyhpl.us/wiki/declaration) was offered as a concise manifesto for open-source, self-directed human enhancement, prompting a meta-discussion on why IRC itself was not listed among the movement’s contribution channels.  
- 3-D printing of food for military rations was dismissed as hype, with participants concluding that merely reshaping nutrients offers no meaningful nutritional or logistical advantage.  
- RAET, the asynchronous event protocol from SaltStack, was suggested as a potential backbone for distributed laboratory automation or swarm-robotics coordination in open biotech projects.