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...
A prototype patch could help the repair the damage caused by a heart attack, scientists say. The early work, carried out on mice and pigs, reveals the protein-infused patch encourages the growth of healthy cells and leads to less scarring. Scarring can be common after a heart attack, making the heart pump less effectively and sometimes fail. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers say the patch may one day revolutionise treatment. During an attack, muscle cells in the heart die because of a lack of blood flow and scientists believe repairing or replacing some of these cells may help reduce long-term damage.
In this trial an international team of researchers soaked a collagen
patch in a protein known as Fstl1 and stitched it on to the hearts of animals who had experienced heart attacks. Though the protein occurs naturally in healthy hearts, it becomes depleted in a key layer of the heart after an attack. Two weeks later the hearts began to grow fresh muscle cells and new blood vessels, while showing signs of pumping more effectively. Prof Pilar Ruiz-Lozano at Stanford University (which has patented the patch), said: "Many were so sick prior to getting the patch that they would have been candidates for heart transplantation.
"The hope is that a similar procedure could eventually be used in human heart attack patients who suffer severe heart damage." Commenting on the study in Nature, Prof Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic at Columbia University, said the work "could lead to entirely new modalities for treating heart infarction". But she cautioned that further studies needed to be done to understand whether this type of approach would work on larger animals and ultimately humans.
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