• AstraZeneca’s “acoustic mass spectrometry” replaces needles with femtoliter droplets generated by sonic pulses, enabling ultra-low-volume sample handling and ionization; the method is detailed in the 2015 paper “Novel Acoustic Loading of a Mass Spectrometer.”  
• Discussion of CANDO, a domain-specific language built on the Clasp Common Lisp implementation, for computer-aided design and optimization of spiroligomer-based nanomaterials; participants debated whether SAT/SMT solvers could outperform CANDO’s custom search heuristics.  
• Frank McSherry’s COST paper (2015) was cited to argue that single-threaded code on a 2014 MacBook Pro can outperform 128-core clusters running modern graph-processing frameworks, reinforcing skepticism toward “big-data” hype.  
• An IARPA proposal requirement—“plain-English Statement of Work with no proprietary information”—was flagged as practically impossible for technical projects, highlighting tension between open science and funding bureaucracy.  
• A lightweight CSV-to-Gantt converter was shared (gist.github.com/nmz787/61a8e8d774913a2af90471b478a09451) to streamline project planning in Gnome Planner, with iterative refinements suggested for parsing task hierarchies.