• A petition titled “Transhumanists Disavow Zoltan Istvan Candidacy” was circulating on ipetitions.com; participants reverse-engineered its AJAX endpoint (http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/transhumanists-disavow-zoltan-istvan-candidacy/ajaxGetSignatures?petition_id=687797&offset=15) to scrape the dynamically-loaded signature list.

• The open-source tool “ducible” (https://github.com/jasonwhite/ducible) was highlighted as a way to achieve reproducible, deterministic Windows builds, a prerequisite for trustworthy bio-software distribution.

• Opentrons liquid-handling robots and their JSON protocol format were critiqued for locking users into the Smoothie controller; the group debated converting these protocols to G-code and creating game-pad or voice interfaces to make the hardware accessible to non-programmer biologists.

• Lifengine (http://www.lifenginetech.com/) was showcased as a startup pairing Opentrons robots with TALEN kits for gene editing, prompting warnings that early-stage hardware choices can become “dead-end” dependencies.

• A DIY inkjet DNA synthesizer concept was proposed using photocleavable terminators, cappers, and linkers, with discussion weighing DMD micromirror arrays against LCD projectors as the optimal light-patterning engine for maskless photo-directed synthesis.

• Lab-grown diamonds now cost ~30 % less than mined stones while meeting jewelry-grade specs, yet they burn at ≈ 900 °C in air—raising durability questions for diamond-like carbon (DLC) coatings on diesel injectors exposed to 2 000 °C combustion peaks.

• The 1996 U.S. patent US5630880 for a “Large Volume Plasma Processor” (LVPP) and the 1969 booklet “The Fusion Torch” by Eastlund & Gough were revisited as early visions of using ultra-high-temperature fusion plasmas for total elemental recycling and isotope separation; participants requested more literature on plasma-based electrodynamic refining techniques.

• The open-source ultrasound imaging project “Murgen” remains active, with current updates on its Hackaday.io page and GitHub repository.

• A new arXiv paper (1611.06172) on “Parallelizing word2vec in multi-core and many-core architectures” was shared, reflecting ongoing interest in scalable machine-learning implementations for bioinformatics and cognitive enhancement research.