The world will end on 21.12.2012, the Maya knew this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04OilEWckAU in German,) so be prepared!
There should be an extra shelter for all (Ex-)ACT members. This would be real fun!! Endless strategic meetings on how to survive after apocalypse!
No, Luzi, there was an error in the profecy transcription... they meant that Italy would end in 2012, not the world..... and they seem to be quite right according to most observers. I am actually surprised it lasted so long!!!
Interesting lab: very young and still in building up / recruiting phase: "Our lab started officially February 2010 - and we are looking for new members! "
looking a bit back to small world nets bibliography I bumped into that. quote: The probability that a Brazilian soccer player has worked at $N$ clubs or played $M$ games shows an exponential decay while the probability that he has scored $G$ goals is power law. (!)
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
Actually read the paper now and think that this is very doubtful that this could be generalised. They used predictions for football games by those betting on outcomes ...