I found a very interesting journal article about the flying techiques of albatrosses. It describes their ability to soar extreme distances by using the different windspeeds over the open sea, similar to the flying technique of dynamical soaring we use for hanggliding.

It's in PLOS One here. 

Happy New Year to everyone!

I found this articles while searching methods for effective PID tuning:

http://www.icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=3D_Printed_Quadrocopter#Tuning_the_PID_loops

The method is described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziegler%E2%80%93Nichols_method

and here:

https://controls.engin.umich.edu/wiki/index.php/PIDTuningClassical#Ziegler-Nichols_Method

Have a happy year 2012!

Regards

Marc