• A new open-source CAD/CAM platform for atomically-precise manufacturing (APM) is being built inside the Godot game engine, targeting a September 2023 public release with a full API for downstream tool builders; the project is advised by Eric Drexler and will migrate its molecular kernel to the Cando/Clasp Lisp ecosystem for advanced scripting.

• Spiroligomers—short, rigid, covalently-bonded peptide-like oligomers—were presented as near-term nanoscale building blocks; 700 distinct 4-mers have already been synthesized, and EM images show they can be linked into 2 nm rigid rods and larger lattices without the folding problems of proteins.

• Participants debated whether open-source APM software should be “open from day one” on GitHub or follow a staged release; the latter is currently planned to secure an initial working demo for marketing and fundraising.

• A conceptual “beach-ball” nanofilter was proposed: an atomically-precise membrane with selective ion channels plus an internal electrochemical sink could passively concentrate uranium or gold from seawater using only osmotic/thermal energy, although simpler ligand-coated membranes were also suggested as practical alternatives.

• MicroED (microcrystal electron diffraction) was highlighted as a 2013 Janelia-developed CryoEM technique for high-resolution structure determination of microcrystals, while AlphaFold’s recent “complete PDB” run was criticized as over-hyped because it merely predicted structures for all PDB entries without validation.

• A new preprint, “Evolutionary-scale prediction of atomic-level protein structure with a language model” (bioRxiv 2022.07.20.500902v2), was shared as an extension of AI-driven protein structure prediction beyond AlphaFold.