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birds in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl are adapting to -- and may even be benefiting from -- long-term exposure to radiation, ecologists have found. The study, published in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology, is the first evidence that wild animals adapt to ionizing radiation, and the first to show that birds which produce most pheomelanin, a pigment in feathers, have greatest problems coping with radiation exposure.

Elon Musk is moving forward with space based internet service...

Facebook announced they are ready to test of of their High Altitude Platform element, a drone of the size of a Boeing 737. See the new here http://phys.org/news/2015-07-facebook-ready-giant-drone-internet.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=ctgr-item&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter. It seemed interesting for me that they are developing also a reliable optical communication between this element and scattered ground stations.

Nice link, that thing is huge and I would love to see a drone that size fly. Also, Facebook's Aerospace Team? :)

remember our recent discussion about this?

Autonomous robot driving through a pedestrian zone in Freiburg, recognizing moving obstacles.

The famous Mars Rover Simulator was a piece of the Evolution in Robotic Island Ariadna!!!!! But again, its only an algorithm :) whats new?

Go Plymouth!

Interesting report on water transport in deep see fault lines. Subduction can suck huge quantities of water of water underground where friction and pressure heat it up causing the mantle to partly melt which leads to volcanic activities around the fault zones. Not all the water would make it back up, leading to the possibility that there might be large quantities of water stored within the earths crust.

where "correct":: the time when the sun is at its maximum height at 12:00

General discussion on how to search for habitable planets

nice summary overview

Assuming the worst, Obama always has its handy antispy kit with him http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/us/politics/obamas-portable-zone-of-secrecy-some-assembly-required.html?hp&_r=2&

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.

The habitable zones of single stars are larger and wider as the temperatures increase. Although hotter stars have the widest regions where water can lie on the surface, they also have short lifetimes that limit the ability of life to evolve. Moons in close binary solar systems have a better chance of hosting life than those in single-star systems, new research has shown.

looks like the study Aurélie wanted to do ...

Quantum Cascade Lasers are rising in the mid-infrared region, the so-called fingerprint zone of the electromagnetic spectrum for a whole bunch of chemical species that we are most of times interested in sensing. One more sign of the underlying importance of this technology comes just by seeing NSF, USHS, Naval Air Command and NASA as the main monetary contributors to this research.

like the idea ....