- David Brin’s 2009 essay “SKEPTIC: Contact Perils” was circulated as a foundational text on risk-assessment and strategic thinking for potential extraterrestrial contact scenarios.  
- Participants sketched a head-mounted FLIR + AR system that overlays heat-maps in real time, citing the Magic Vision Lab prototype as the target form factor and contrasting it with legacy aviation HUDs.  
- A proposal for “uplifting” octopus intelligence was debated: automated, camera-driven computer-vision sorting of thousands of embryos per hour to perform iterated-embryo selection, with Nick Bostrom’s embryo-selection paper offered as theoretical support.  
- DIYbio threads examined T1-diabetes etiology, in-vivo somatic-cell reprogramming to regenerate pancreatic β-cells, and 2014 iGEM projects that reset adaptive immunity or engineer human vitamin C synthesis using lemur genes.  
- Stand-out 2014 iGEM projects were catalogued: enzymatic conversion of ABO blood to universal type, microglia-mediated astrocyte→neuron conversion for neural repair, a low-error Pfu polymerase biobrick kit, TdT-based benchtop DNA synthesis that bypasses phosphoramidite chemistry, and ribosomal expansion to >100 non-proteinogenic building blocks for directed evolution.  
- Open-source hardware packaging was critiqued: SKDB’s design flaws, Octopart’s failure to curate electronics packages, and the need for CAD-centric workflows were highlighted as barriers to reproducible bio-hardware.  
- Practical biohacking resources were pooled: diyhpl.us/wiki/dna/projects/ now hosts a curated “interesting subset” of iGEM 2014 entries, GitHub’s igemsoftware repo was shared, and sci-hub proxy tweaks for IEEE papers were circulated.  
- Genspace’s iGEM team drew criticism for disregarding prior DIYbio-list objections to DNA2.0’s restrictive licensing, spotlighting ongoing community friction over open-source versus proprietary gene synthesis.