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slashdot describes the drill as "a self-driving mole developed by the German space agency (DLR)". This seems to be the drill: GEMS - a mole to explore the interior of Mars, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/OCEANSE.2009.5278132. Interesting news for all the roots people :)

The scientific rationale behind it is that at km-depth there could be a) water resources (which could support a biosphere) and b) understand the formation of Mars. I would argue that an efficient drilling (robot) is also valuable for possible developing underground habitation (caves) at some point. This paper mentions two drilling concepts, but we could come up with many more (bio-inspired) probably. Daniel already came up with a nice one.. microwave drilling Also, the NASA InSight probe to Mars in 2016 is using a DLR-designed 'Mole' drill that is designed to reach a depth of... 5 meters

In this case I was thinking more about a smaller and controlled digging effort.. not ablating a football field sized hole

Nice one! plenty of examples in nature for this

This is about biological and technical hygromorphs, i.e. structures that change shape according to humidity. Next to pine cones, there is also a cool study on wheat awns which drill themselves into the soil just by daily variance of air humidity. Biomimetics would be passively controlled acutators or humidity driven valves in space station to open/close dehumidification devices.

Interesting, but only an abstract... do you have the full paper ?

Not yet. There is also some other nice mechanism of wheat awns and how they use changes in humidity to anchor in soil. Would maybe fit with the above mentioned work of oisin.

Similar to the GSP related driller study.

FEM modelling of bone structures in woodpeckers combined with high speed video of pecking motion etc headgear? shock absorbing structures? low mass hammering penetrators? Lizhen Wang1,2, Jason Tak-Man Cheung3, Fang Pu1, Deyu Li1, Ming Zhang2*, Yubo Fan1* 1 Key Laboratory for Biomechanics and Mechanobiology of Ministry of Education, School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, People's Republic of China, 2 Department of Health Technology and Informatics, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, 3 Li Ning Sports Science Research Center, Beijing, People's Republic of China Head injury is a leading cause of morbidity and death in both industrialized and developing countries.

Its doing it again. Anyone wants to play the "explain this" game?

New debates on 'old' topic: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-alien-megastructure-dimming-mysterious-star.html? see blog posts in link for more info