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Solar plane lands in New York City

A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said.  The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website.  Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...

Ocean's tiniest organisms revealed

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The hidden world of the ocean's tiniest organisms has been revealed in a series of papers published in the journal Science. An international team has been studying samples of plankton collected during a three-year global expedition. They have so far found 35,000 species of bacteria, 5,000 new viruses and 150,000 single-celled plants and creatures.They believe that the majority of these are new to science.

Image result for ocean's tiniest organismsDr Chris Bowler, from the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), in Paris, told BBC News: "We have the most complete description yet of planktonic organisms to date: what's there in terms of viruses, bacteria and protozoa - we finally have a catalogue of what is present globally."Planktonic organisms are minute, but together they make up 90% of the mass of all of the marine life in the oceans.

They include viruses, bacteria, single-celled plants and creatures (protozoa). They form the very base of the food chain, and produce - through photosynthesis - half of the oxygen we breathe. However, until now, little has been known about this unseen ocean ecosystem. The Tara expedition, primarily funded by the French fashion designer Agnes B, set out to change that.

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