- A 30 W laser cutter in a hackerspace was praised for its high utility in cutting plastics while staying within strict national import and power regulations; participants joked about the desirability of 100 kW home units and complementary “6-axis cryogenic CNC machines.”  
- Toxicity of laser-cut plastics was highlighted—especially PVC and unknown floor-tile compositions—prompting recommendations for external ventilation and fume extraction for both laser cutters and 3-D printers.  
- One maker described retrofitting a desktop 3-D printer with a 3 W laser module to enable dual-purpose additive manufacturing and thin-material cutting (e.g., self-adhesive floor tiles).  
- A trove of open-access neuroscience papers was shared, covering comparative primate brain morphology, gene-expression divergence between humans and chimps, metabolic costs of human brain development, and large-scale lipidomic and synaptic-transcriptome atlases.  
- Links to GWU’s Laboratory of Evolutionary Neuroscience publications and a Nature News piece on digitizing retired chimpanzee brains were circulated, along with high-resolution figures and supplementary datasets.  
- A brief discussion of cryonics adaptation strategies suggested that basic limb-regeneration research and improved post-thaw healing methods might mitigate systemic cryoinjury beyond simple cryotoxin removal.  
- kanzure proposed naming an inkjet DNA oligo synthesizer the “dnaminator.”  
- docl posted a technical note on optical-tweezer advances, citing 1992 Kawata & Sugiura work on evanescent-field particle propulsion along optical waveguides at ~100 nm proximity.  
- Multiple transcript commits from the Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong workshop were added to diyhpl.us, covering segregated witness, Lightning Network BIPs, validation-cost metrics, and novel block-size proposals (BIP-100, BIP-102).