- Proxima Centauri b discovery: A terrestrial planet candidate in a temperate orbit around the nearest star was announced in Nature (Anglada-Escudé et al., 2016).  
- Interstellar probe concepts: Discussion compared laser-pushed light sails (20-year cruise, TRL 1) with electrostatic solar sails (TRL 4/5) that could place a microwave interferometer at the Sun’s gravitational focal line to image Proxima b with ~80 km resolution at 22 GHz.  
- Gravitational-lens communications: Emphasis on using the Sun as a 550-AU focal telescope for high-data-rate links to any future Proxima probes; referenced Claudio Maccone’s 2009 book “Deep Space Flight and Communications: Exploiting the Sun as a Gravitational Lens.”  
- Microfluidic design automation: nmz787_ shared two 2016 papers proposing SMT-based synthesis of microfluidic chips—Khan et al. “Towards Microfluidic Design Automation” and Aono et al. “Amoeba-Inspired Nanoarchitectonic Computing”—both using Z3/dReal solvers to convert PDEs into SMT2 for layout generation.  
- Open-source spectrometer work: chris_99 demonstrated a camera-based spectrometer; nmz787_ offered Python code (openSpectrometer.py) and suggested RAW-BMP capture to avoid JPEG compression artifacts.  
- Compliant mechanisms & topology optimization: xentrac highlighted the 2013 “Handbook of Compliant Mechanisms,” noting flexures’ orders-of-magnitude advantages in efficiency, wear, and precision for nanoscale machines and mechanical digital logic.