• A Marginal Revolution post on the 1918 influenza pandemic’s long-term socioeconomic effects was circulated as a lens for predicting COVID-19’s legacy, framing the outbreak as a potential catalyst for permanent institutional change.  

• Participants argued that CLIA certification and similar regulations effectively criminalize citizen science, proposing that access to diagnostic tools—PCR machines, sequencers, spectrometers, even CRISPR—should be treated as a civil right comparable to the Second Amendment.  

• Open-source hardware responses to PPE shortages were shared, including a copper-infused 3-D-printed mask design (“Hack the Pandemic”) and the German #WirVsVirusHackathon, alongside a Stanford student’s bootleg COVID-19 testing lab highlighted on Hacker News.  

• A debate over mask filtration physics compared the filter medium to chromatography paper, with some arguing that aerosol particles “break through” after transient retention while others invoked kinetic and osmotic-pressure models to explain steady-state capture.  

• UV-C LED prices were noted to be spiking, prompting half-serious speculation that the diodes could become a post-collapse currency; meanwhile, AMS-IX traffic was reported up ~20 % since Europe’s outbreak, attributed to ubiquitous 50-person Zoom calls.  

• The channel explored foundational physics reformulations, including the idea that Planck’s constant might emerge as a mathematically determined dimensionless quantity and that black-body radiation could be derived from a “natural” energy-level density function constraining the fine-structure constant.  

• Participants discussed the conceptual bridge from discrete molecular orbitals to continuous crystal band structures, emphasizing that band theory is an approximation valid only for sufficiently large lattices and recounting how density-functional theory is often taught without rigorous variational calculus.