• kanzure warned that U.S. academic research is “really really broken” due to a glut of workers and should not be treated as a long-term career path, although it remains useful for short-term training and skill acquisition.

• FourFire is organizing a transhumanist-oriented DIY-bio group at a Norwegian hackerspace and asked for advice on recruiting new students from the University of Oslo; kanzure recommended focusing on small, short-term, achievable projects rather than large, diffuse efforts.

• kanzure provided two curated resource lists for concrete starter projects: “http://diyhpl.us/wiki/dna/projects/#igem-2014” (iGEM 2014 project ideas) and “http://diyhpl.us/wiki/genetic-modifications/” (genetic-modification examples).

• maaku proposed developing an open-source “programmable wet-lab-in-a-box” with consumer-3-D-printer-level usability to enable remote collaboration and reduce the need for every participant to replicate full physical lab setups.

• chris_99 shared the “Open Surgery” initiative (http://www.opensurgery.net/), an open-source laparoscopic surgery project, although detailed specs were not immediately visible on the site.

• ybit_ highlighted the “Bio-Nano DAC” concept from hack.ether.camp, describing a future in which on-board medical nanorobots perform cellular repair while smart-contract DACs track activity and allocate resources via cryptoeconomic mechanisms.

• nmz787_ offered a Python library for neural-computer interfaces, “pyNCS/pyosc” (http://inincs.github.io/pyNCS/general/pyosc.html), as an alternative when the sigrok toolchain proved difficult to use.