- A home-built scanning-tunneling microscope (STM) project at http://dberard.com/home-built-stm/ demonstrates grassroots nanotechnology instrumentation.  
- The channel debated open-source governance, citing a Hacker News thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8921338) that compares community-gatekeeper workflows to Linux’s maintainer model.  
- BRL-CAD and its Python bindings (python-brlcad) were tested; despite segfaults, usable .g files were produced, with plans to integrate the CAD engine into a blue-laser micro-milling setup for microfluidic prototyping.  
- Fabrication trade-offs were discussed: one 3-D printer build was ~70 % milled wood, 20 % electronics, and 5 % 3-D-printed parts, reinforcing the preference for CNC mills as general-purpose prototyping tools.  
- Microfluidic DNA synthesis resurfaced; kanzure linked the 2004 “Microfluidic PicoArray synthesis” paper (http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/microfluidics/synthesis/…) and proposed collaboration with genehacker.  
- Reason-maintenance/truth-maintenance systems were surveyed, including the Ruby library “terry” (https://github.com/arwagner/terry), Scheme propagators, and belief-network shells, highlighting interest in AI that tracks justifications and handles contradictory data.  
- Mercury’s declarative debugger was introduced as a tool that, given a buggy event, automatically locates the faulty assertion by reasoning from the intended semantics of the program.  
- The Feynman Algorithm (c2.com wiki) was cited as a humorous but insightful three-step problem-solving heuristic: write down the problem, think really hard, write down the answer.