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...
Engineers and physicists have discovered a property of silicon which could aid the development of faster computers.Currently, copper wires transfer information in a computer; the process is slowed down as the wires heat up."Photonic" and "spintronic" computing is the principle of transferring information by light or electron spin.This new property means that silicon-based light detectors identify spin, so more information can be transferred. Spin is a property of sub-atomic particles, which influences the ordering of electrons and nuclei in atoms and molecules.The discovered property is usually observed in materials containing heavy elements, which are difficult to integrate into existing computing systems that are composed mainly of silicon.
Silicon is a highly symmetrical crystal, but by changing the
geometry of it, the team was able to impart "chiral" properties to it. Something is chiral if the mirror image of the object cannot be superimposed on the original.This chirality means that silicon-based detectors are able to detect the spin of electrons and light, and as a result allow more information to be transmitted. "The whole computer running with light is a distant dream, but some copper inter-connectors can be replaced with light and photo-detector devices," Professor Ritesh Agarwal, who led this study at the University of Pennsylvania, told.
"This is only around five years away from now. The technology already exists, but this can bring added functionality."The discovery was made by accident, while investigating heavier materials.As well as discovering chirality in silicon, this study has wider implications for materials science."It's the same silicon, all we've done is cut it in a particular direction," explained Professor Ritesh Agarwal. This is a step towards engineering new, useful properties by changing the geometry of a material.
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