• The Human Brain Project is denounced in a guest post on mathbabe.org for consuming more public money than all federal grants to Berkeley and MIT combined, igniting debate on the scale and direction of publicly funded science.  
• A Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Myth of Basic Science” is rejected by participants who argue that business R&D cannot replace public science, while acknowledging the WSJ’s pro-market bias.  
• Open-source CAD development is explored: VerbNURBS is praised as a cleaner geometry engine than OpenCASCADE, yet missing pieces such as constraint solving, STEP export, and robust fillet/chamfer algorithms are identified as blockers for full-featured hardware design.  
• Automated proof checking is proposed as a way to elevate mathematical discourse; Coq and Microsoft’s newly open-sourced Z3 theorem prover are cited as existing tools, though still far above everyday engineering practice.  
• A low-cost, open-source DNA oligo synthesizer is detailed: an inkjet-style microarray deposits successive reagent droplets on micro-spots to build 100-mer oligos in parallel, with open questions on droplet merging, waste removal, and post-synthesis pooling.  
• Mars terraforming concepts include evolving extremophile bacteria in simulated Martian conditions, deploying concentrated “blimp incubators” to harvest atmospheric volatiles, and releasing engineered microbial pellets over the poles or Hellas Basin to bootstrap planetary biospheres.  
• Fully automated rodent facility designs are brainstormed: PVC pipe habitats, microwave radar monitoring, air-jet microfluidics for waste handling, RFID-based socialization scheduling, and a “skydiving column” vertical airflow rig to separate mice from bedding and each other for high-throughput phenotyping.  
• Participants call for more manual transcription of technical talks to aid accessibility; existing transcripts of the MIT Bitcoin Expo 2015 and other events are hosted at diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/.