- nmz787 showcased a weekend project: a custom vacuum-deposition system controller built for thin-film coating experiments, with photos posted on Imgur.  
- agile_prg won 2nd place in an online COVID-19 hackathon with an interactive web tool that visualizes disease spread and mitigation strategies.  
- Participants debated why respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 exhibit strong winter peaks, converging on low ambient humidity (≈20 %) that shrinks droplets and prolongs airborne survival, plus higher UV and outdoor activity in summer.  
- A STAT News article on using computational “Lego-style” protein design for next-gen coronavirus vaccines was shared and praised as validation of modular, structure-based antigen engineering.  
- fltrz and yashgaroth discussed the essential-amino-acid status of phenylalanine, noting that even though tyrosine can partially substitute, human proteins still require a baseline dietary intake, especially for catecholamine synthesis.  
- kanzure circulated two papers on proactive threshold wallets: a Zengo blog post and an IACR preprint describing Shamir-secret-sharing schemes that let offline devices refresh keys without exposing secrets.  
- Luke Dashjr tweeted an open-source, regulation-skirting COVID-19 vaccine “code drop” proposal, prompting questions about what wet-lab steps and materials would be needed to synthesize and test such a vaccine.  
- lsneff linked a Hackaday article on the Dexter robot arm’s new micro-factory, highlighting distributed 3-D printing and automated assembly for small-batch hardware production.