- X-ray tomography with ≤50 nm resolution and 16 nm voxels was proposed as a non-destructive alternative to serial-section SEM for reverse-engineering integrated circuits; commercial Xradia instruments and focused-ion-beam (FIB) fabrication of zone plates were cited as practical routes, supported by a 2001 SPIE paper (http://spie.org/Publications/Proceedings/Paper/10.1117/12.411652).

- Participants debated the feasibility of a purely mechanical evaluator for a single round of SHA-2, while DelinqueMe received 1 000 Google Compute Engine CPUs and 10 PB of persistent storage under an $800 research credit, prompting a live cost/usage calculation of $0.0042 per 10 CPU-minutes.

- AGI was framed as the fastest route to transhumanist goals, with a proposed benchmark task of “design me a nanofactory starting from today’s tools”; Dyna, a datalog-derived causally-typed language, was suggested as a formal representation layer, while the Freitas–Merkle minimal toolset of nine diamondoid mechanosynthetic tooltip types was highlighted as the canonical starting point for molecular manufacturing.

- Brain Backups (brainbackups.com) claims to be developing non-destructive, high-resolution brain imaging using aptamer-tagged nanoparticles, gold nanorods, voltage-sensitive dyes, and MRI contrast agents, with an estimated $81 k storage cost for full synapse-level data.

- Commercial DNA foundries’ handling of dangerous sequences was discussed, including the existence of voluntary screening systems like Transcriptic, DNA2.0, and Blackwatch software, alongside a live Marburg-virus genome (NC_001608) and a GENEWIZ press release about rapid Ebola-gene synthesis for China CDC.

- Transcriptic’s fully robotic lab and its JSON protocol, now adopted by the open-source OpenTrons liquid-handling platform, were cited as early examples of cloud-lab standardization, while Craig Venter’s $40 M “Synthia” minimal-cell project was criticized as less impactful than cheaper whole-genome synthesis (~$1/genome).

- A 384-well pipetting heat-map (http://i.imgur.com/VhNTTZf.png) illustrated how end-of-day fatigue increases aerosol contamination, turning sloppy bench technique into quantifiable data, while Android-based lab-instrument apps from Lab4U (http://lab4u.cl/lets-experiment/) won a $50 k Intel award for open-source mobile science tools.

- The Foresight “Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems” and the Brain Emulation Roadmap report were shared as foundational documents, alongside open-source infrastructure links including the SKDB package system for hardware dependencies and the NanoEngineer CAD suite for nanotech design.