Engineering and improving great tits so they can better withstand climate change. By selectively breeding and genetically engineering the birds scientists try to keep the time when the birds produce offspring in sync with the changing availability of food sources in spring (mainly grubs).

At least we don't come up with this kind of crap!

Interesting historical perspective. Progress since the late '80 really seems to be fairly slow. ?: Do we need to wait for the singularity until speech recognition works without flaws?

"I thought I would give it a try on my android sexy seems to work pretty well and I'm speaking more less at normal speed" Actually I was speaking as fast as I could because it was for the google search input - if you make a pause it will think you finished your input and start the query. Also you might notice that Android thinks it is "android sexy" - this was meant to be "on my Android. THIS seems to work...". Still it is not too bad - maybe in a year or two they have it working. Of course it might also be that I just use the word "sexy" randomly... :-\

"Edward Snowden papers unmask close technical cooperation and loose alliance between British, German, French, Spanish and Swedish spy agencies" - I thought we were the good guys... ;-D

Apparently this cart settled some longstanding physics dispute... Would there be a way to think of something similar using solar wind? *no clue*

But from that point of view it should also be counter-intuitive that it travels against the wind at twice the speed of the wind...

I think we should have some of these in the office for teleworking. Also would be cool to interact with family back home. Check out the video (especially the Jedi light saber fight at the end)! :-D

Just pre-ordered it (should be ~200 - 250€). Unfortunately not clear yet when they will be ready to ship the items.

Nice overview and animation of what that means for the Solar system.

But is it random..?

Great explanations of space stuff for people who are not experts (for example children) :-)

Relevant to our recent discussion on big data at ESA?

Song birds don't eat in the morning because the added weight makes them slow and easy prey for other birds. They look for good food places during the early day and come back to eat as late as possible. Correlation of this behavior with the number of predators has been found as well...

Editor of Wired describes his experience

Instead of round silk threads this spider produces flat ribbons 40-80 nm in thickness. Still the material is as strong as Kevlar and much more elastic.

check the video

To MIT I guess ;-)