- A New-York-based start-up lab asked for guidance on building a low-cost DIY ultraviolet photoelectron spectrometer (UVPES) as an alternative to XPS, citing prior DIY experience with powder XRD and solid-state/liquid NMR.  
- CaptHindsight located <$50 piezoelectric micropumps (CurieJet) suitable for microfluidic or ink-jet projects and shared Alibaba and manufacturer links.  
- Discussion of open hardware preferences: nmz787_i described “Arduino” as more meme than necessity, while CaptHindsight advocated STM32 microcontrollers and noted the open-source Gamma Cardio ECG project that uses a certified PIC 16C773.  
- Bricobio.org (“Science for everyone”) was introduced as a new community lab initiative.  
- A Cell paper on “Photosensitivity of Neurons Enabled by Cell-Targeted Gold Nanoparticles” was highlighted; the technique uses gold nanoparticles to heat local lipids and trigger action potentials without ion channels, offering a route to vision restoration in damaged retinas.  
- kanzure circulated a Hacker News critique explaining architectural flaws in Ripple and Stellar consensus networks.  
- andytoshi and kanzure explored Python tools for automated text mining, specifically gensim (topic modelling) and NLTK, for building personal e-mail classifiers.  
- libgen (Library Genesis) was reported to hold ~12–16 TB of pay-walled papers; its latest mirrors and a dubious “lottery” fundraising subdomain were noted.  
- paperbot served several requested papers, including one on cellular automata as an alternative to differential equations in physics modelling.