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...
Authentic Chinese records have helped researchers to track the decrease of the world's rarest primates. Today, China has somewhere around 26 and 28 Hainan gibbons left, yet government records that go back to the seventeenth Century demonstrate that gibbons were once broad crosswise over a large portion of the nation. The gorillas started to vanish from the records around 150 years prior, relating with populace development. The study is distributed in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Hainan gibbons are now limited to a few isolated patches of forest in the south west of China. They live in just four social groups, one of which was only discovered a few weeks ago.
Understanding this population crash has been difficult, but the old government documents have helped to reveal when and how the numbers fell.Dr Sam Turvey, from the Zoological Society, said: "China is one of the few places in the world that has a very very rich, long historical record. "Because it has had such a complex bureaucracy for so long, there has been a lot of need for reporting - not just numbers of households for tax purposes and things like that, but also in terms of the kinds of natural resources that were available in the immediate environment." These included records of animals, including gibbons, he said.
"We looked at the pattern of disappearance of gibbons through time and how that varied from place to place and the different environmental conditions and human pressures that were also present in these places." The archives show that gibbons were a common sight in about 20 provinces in China well into the 17th and 18th Century. However, Dr Turvey said it was "a stark contrast to their very imperilled position today". "We see a really steep increase in population decline and real population collapse across China about 100-150 years ago," he added."And this correlates with demographic expansion in China towards the end of the Imperial era and through the 20th Century, and the massive increase in deforestation and human population growth through the time of the Chinese Republic and the establishment of the communist party."
The researchers said a better understanding of the animals' decline would help them to establish a conservation plan for the country's last few Hainan gibbons.
Dr Turvey said: "It is an incredible privilege to be able to see gibbons in China in the wild.
"The Hainan gibbon is such as rare species, but knowing that this species is still hanging on there gives you hope that conservation will be able to bring that population back form the brink."
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