- An open-source “rubble-search” kit is sought that can detect and locate living people buried under up to 20 m of debris, inspired by a tweet from Nick Farr.  
- Key papers on artificial molecular machines were circulated, including a 2017 Nature report on a programmable stereodivergent synthesizer that shuttles substrates between activating sites to yield four diastereoisomers in one pot, and earlier work on rotaxane-based peptide synthesis and autonomous molecular assemblers.  
- DNA-templated multistep organic synthesis was highlighted through Angewandte Chemie, PNAS, JACS, and Nature Nanotechnology papers showing DNA walkers and strand-displacement cascades that execute six-step reactions isothermally, each step triggered by specific instruction strands.  
- Practical biohacker resources shared include Opentrons protocol tutorials, Addgene’s AAV vector guides, and a high-resolution teardown archive (diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/DNA/abi391/takeitapart/) of an ABI 391 DNA synthesizer for open-hardware replication.  
- A cost thought-experiment estimated that coating an entire Boeing 747 with synthetic DNA would require ~4 × 10²² bases, costing only $0.013–$1.33 at current 0.001–0.1 ¢/base prices, illustrating the plummeting cost of DNA synthesis.  
- The channel debated the feasibility of recovering dinosaur DNA from fossilized feces (consensus: no), critiqued Ginkgo Bioworks’ self-fertilizing crop hype, and summarized George Church’s woolly-mammoth de-extinction project at Revive & Restore.  
- Molecular Assemblies’ TdT-based enzymatic DNA synthesis using removable terminators was noted, but the inefficient terminator-removal step was flagged; earlier enzymatic-terminator concepts from channel logs were suggested for re-examination.  
- A case study of public-domain software (SNLO from Sandia) disappearing and re-emerging as a $150 commercial product sparked discussion on Bayh-Dole, FOIA strategies, and the ethics of privatizing taxpayer-funded code.