• A 2002 Vanderbilt paper on monopropellant-powered linear pneumatic actuators was highlighted as a promising lightweight, high-force actuator for next-generation robotics and prosthetics.  
• Participants debated a Frontiers paper proposing that thalamocortical layer-1 projections function as “alpha motor neurons of thought,” questioning whether the underlying micro-circuitry is genetically pre-patterned or shaped by lifetime plasticity.  
• The absence of any modern, high-resolution repeat of Cajal’s complete-brain Golgi study or von Economo’s 1929 Nissl survey was noted; a low-cost replication using today’s optics and fresh animal brains was suggested as a valuable open-science project.  
• 3Scan’s knife-edge scanning microscope (0.6 µm × 0.7 µm × 1.0 µm voxel, 3 600 slices/h) was cited as a commercial route to whole-brain histology at sub-micron resolution.  
• A PLOS ONE paper demonstrated Golden Gate DNA assembly performed in 3-D-printed microfluidic chips (490 nL reaction volumes, 220 µm channels) with open design files released on Metafluidics, illustrating the convergence of synthetic biology and open-source hardware.  
• Neurolex.org and the NIF-Ontology OWL files were shared as open resources for standardized neuroanatomical terminology and data integration.  
• A review paper on thalamocortical synaptic plasticity (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1044743107000024) was circulated, emphasizing NMDA-receptor–dependent plasticity, kainate receptors, and rapid GABAergic maturation as drivers of barrel-cortex map refinement.  
• The open-source probabilistic-forecasting tool “Guesstimate” (https://github.com/getguesstimate/guesstimate-app) was introduced for Fermi-style modeling and uncertainty quantification.