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The location of the second largest volcanic eruption in human history, the waters off Greece's Santorini are the site of newly discovered opalescent pools forming at 250 meters depth. The interconnected series of meandering, iridescent white pools contain high concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO 2) and may hold answers to questions related to deepsea carbon storage as well as provide a means of monitoring the volcano for future eruptions.

We were there last year, swimming in one of those 'healthy' mud pits..

250m and we did not know about them ??

nice podcast ... ESTEC YGT community might be an interesting study pool ....

haha ;) I dunno what the general idea of the YGTs here at ESTEC is ;)

A good occasion to get the idea out of the idea pool...?

Driverless cars will soon be a reality on the roads of Nevada after the state approved America's first self-driven vehicle licence. The first to hit the highway will be a Toyota Prius modified by search firm Google, which is leading the way in driverless car technology.

makes me think of the trend years ago to promote car-pooling and avoid 1 driver per car. The trend continues!

so it took us 70% of the time Earth is in the habitable zone to develop, would this be normal or could it be much faster? In other words, would all forms of life that started on a planet that originated at a 'similar' point in time like us, be equally far developed?

That is actually quite tricky to estimate rly. If for no other reason than the fact that all of the mass extinctions we had over the Earth's history basically reset the evolutionary clock. Assuming 2 Earths identical in every way but one did not have the dinosaur wipe-out impact, that would've given non-impact Earth 60million years to evolve a potential dinosaur intelligent super race.

The opposite might be true - or might not be ;-). Since usually the rate of evolution increases after major extinction events the chance is higher to produce 'intelligent' organisms if these events happen quite frequently. Usually the time of rapid evolution is only a few million years - so Earth is going quite slow. Certainly extinction events don't reset the evolutionary clock - if they would never have happened Earth gene pool would probably be quite primitive. By the way: dinosaurs were a quite diverse group and large dinosaurs might well have had cognitive abilities that come close to whales or primates - the difference to us might be that we have hands to manipulate our environment and vocal cords to communicate in very diverse ways. Modern dinosaur (descendents), i.e. birds, contain some very intelligent species - especially with respect to their body size and weight.

In case you are looking for inspiration for a new piece of ACT's meeting room furniture... "This is almost an example, not of mathematics but how mathematics changes when it becomes physics"