- A Nature article on the UK Dial-a-Molecule project (a £700 k, 450-researcher consortium) and MIT/Novartis continuous-flow machine was debated; the system produced aliskiren tablets in 47 h versus 300 h batch time, while Derek Lowe’s Pipeline blog argued such automation will remain confined to “well-defined” chemistry.

- Historical and technical papers were retrieved on demand, spanning Sanger’s 1943-1977 transition from protein to DNA sequencing, early J. Mol. Biol. and Science methods, and a Nature population-genomics survey.

- The open-source autofab recipe collection (https://github.com/FeepingCreature/autofab/blob/master/recipes.txt) was shared as a community resource for fabrication workflows.

- Discussion contrasted the 1970s LHASA synthesis-planning program—hampered by small, error-ridden reaction databases—with Grzybowski’s modern Chematica, a 6 M-compound / 6 M-reaction network mined from Reaxys, whose licensing fees were decried as the chief barrier to open automated synthesis.

- An unverified report claimed Eli Lilly already runs a “completely automated organic synthesis machine” in Indianapolis, while participants voiced a near-term wish for a robot that merely automates chromatographic column runs to boost bench productivity.

- Sub-$5 Cypress PSoC4 CPLD boards and a curated list of ultra-cheap FPGA boards were circulated as entry-level hardware for open biotech or neuro-hacking projects.

- A Washington Post profile of a security researcher who “sees the Internet” through irssi and Python supybot prompted the quip that “the future sure does look a lot like 1997.”