- A $100 DIY spin-coater project was outlined, using a programmable BLDC motor with back-EMF sensing or an encoder plus inexpensive rotary-vacuum bearings to undercut the $500 eBay listings and bulky industrial units.

- Y Combinator launched a “YC for Hardware” track that explicitly welcomes capital-intensive projects such as nuclear reactors and rockets, citing Skully AR helmets and Boosted skateboards as portfolio examples.

- Participants debated how to create high-torque planar actuators (10–500 ft-lb) in a single photolithographic or spatial-light-modulation step, eliminating multi-part assembly for mesoscale motion systems.

- Candidate actuator technologies discussed included scroll expanders, Tesla turbines, Brayton-cycle micro-turbines, wobble motors, harmonic drives, piezoelectric pancake motors, PCB-trace “pancake” motors, magnetohydrodynamic linear actuators, fluidyne/Stirling liquid-piston engines, and shape-memory-alloy muscle wire.

- A 2003 SEM paper on a MEMS-scale diesel Wankel engine (http://sem-proceedings.com/03s/sem.org-2003-SEM-Ann-Conf-s52p01-Invited-MEMS-Rotary-Engine-Power-System-Project-Overview-Recent.pdf) was cited as the closest existing micro-engine reference.

- Delbert Tesar’s “VLSI for mechanics” vision of mass-produced, standardized intelligent electromechanical actuators with built-in sensing and control was highlighted via a leaked 2008 DoD briefing (http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/attach/35/35859_CIRV%20prop%20doc0020511.pdf).

- Mozilla’s “node-firefox” project—embedding V8 inside Firefox for Node.js compatibility—was noted, alongside Debian Science’s call for new maintainers and TI’s encrypted SPICE library frustrations.

- Cryonics financing was clarified: Alcor still collects the assigned life-insurance benefit even if the member is unusable, though optional settlement modes can be negotiated to prevent this outcome.

- The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco is being converted into Wearable World Inc.’s headquarters, prompting local meet-up coordination among Bay-Area transhumanists and visiting Blockstream team members from Montreal, Malta, Spain, and Switzerland.