- A GitHub pull-request to Wei Dai’s extropians archive (https://github.com/weidai11/extropians/pull/1) was noted as having been ignored, highlighting ongoing efforts to curate historical transhumanist material.  
- A PLOS ONE paper on “Low-Cost Mobile Phone Microscopy with a Reversed Mobile Phone Camera Lens” (http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0095330) was shared, underscoring DIY/open-source approaches to lab-grade imaging.  
- nmz787 reported progress reverse-engineering an unknown binary pattern file from a focused-ion-beam (FIB) system, showing barely-recognizable bitmaps and speculating the data may be two single-byte values plus an offset byte rather than packed 12-bit samples; sample images and code were posted at http://diyhpl.us/~nmz787/actual.jpg and http://bpaste.net/show/e29018b2bcc8.  
- Discussion of molecular-visualization tools included warnings that Mayavi2 and VTK proved unstable on Windows without hardware 3D, while PyMOL was recommended for its broad compatibility with both local and web-based rendering.  
- kanzure resurfaced MetaCyc “superpathway” diagrams (e.g., http://biocyc.com/META/NEW-IMAGE?type=PATHWAY&object=PWY-5634) as examples of interactive, organism-spanning metabolic maps, prompting jrayhawk to consider building similar graphviz-plus-imagemap resources for personal use.  
- A 1988 paper on “Machine learning in quantitative histology” (PMID 3166674) was retrieved by paperbot, illustrating early adoption of ML in biological image analysis.  
- Brendan Gregg’s Linux performance-observability tools chart (http://www.brendangregg.com/Perf/linux_observability_tools.png) was circulated as a reference for systems-level instrumentation relevant to bioinformatics pipelines.  
- kanzure clarified to delinquentme that adding microfluidic valves increases device complexity, but did not elaborate on the exponential scaling claim.