- A $24 GHz FMCW radar transceiver (RFbeam K-LC1a, ≈ $5) was presented as an ultra-low-cost platform for Doppler and ranging experiments; Hackaday’s 2014 “Try Radar for Your Next Project” and Greg Charvat’s “Tin-Can Radar” were recommended as step-by-step build guides, with USB-audio cards at 44.1 kHz shown to be adequate for capturing the low-frequency beat notes.  

- Christoph Laimer’s fully 3-D-printed tourbillon watch was highlighted as a landmark in additive manufacturing for precision mechanics, while a new Hackaday article on binder-jet metal-powder printing plus sintering rekindled discussion of DIY metal printers and the need for high-temperature post-processing furnaces.  

- The 2015 review “Soft materials in neuroengineering for hard problems in neuroscience” was circulated, covering hydrogels, conductive polymers, and flexible implants as next-gen brain–machine interface substrates.  

- A Berkeley Lab press release on a one-pot, high-gravity cellulosic-ethanol process using a renewable “bionic liquid” ionic solvent from lignin/hemicellulose was shared, reporting 41.1 g/L ethanol titers without intermediate separations; electrofuels.org was introduced as a resource on microbes fed electricity to synthesize fuels and chemicals.  

- Participants debated the long-term stability of engineered microbial fuel production, noting that rapid evolution favors fast replicators over product-formers and that contamination will likely require frequent sterilization and re-inoculation cycles.  

- Memory Neural Networks (MemNN) for question-answering and the Allen AI Science Challenge were discussed as concrete milestones toward AGI, alongside skepticism that current symbolic math packages still demand extensive human guidance and that no autonomous equation-solver yet exists.  

- Dyson-sphere construction timelines were estimated: once dimming of a star becomes detectable, the build rate could reach 0.2 % per year, with progress argued to be exponential rather than linear.  

- Cryonics transparency was defended for Alcor, yet skeptics claimed that even optimistic providers privately “know it won’t work” but continue because customers demand hope.  

- A polarized debate on post-human futures weighed the merits of radical intelligence enhancement and potential AI takeover, with some welcoming a star-faring, self-evolving AI as preferable to “disorganized” humanity, while others insisted on preserving all Earth life and advocated FAI-mediated or carefully planned transitions.