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...
Weight loss surgery cures half of patients with type-2 diabetes, for at least five years, a study suggests. The trial, on 60 people, published in the Lancet, found none of those with type 2 had been cured by medication and diet alone. The surgery improves symptoms both through weight loss and by changing the way the gut functions. Experts said the results were "remarkable" and that too few people were getting access to the surgery. The team, at King's College London and the Universita Cattolica in Rome, compared standard drug therapy with surgery to rewire the digestive tract. The operations reduced the size of the stomach and left less of the intestines exposed to food.
Prof Francesco Rubino, who operated on the patients, told
The results were better two years after surgery. However, some patients relapsed in the past three years. The surgeons say there still needs to be continual monitoring of blood sugar levels even after the operation. Drs Dimitri Pournaras and Carel le Roux, from Imperial College London, said diabetes was "the plague of the 21st Century" and that the results were "remarkable". They added: "Surgery for diabetes seems to be safe, effective in terms of glycaemic [sugar] control, and is now associated with reduced complications of diabetes.
"The ultimate question is whether diabetes surgery is associated with reduced mortality." However they said surgery needed to "become more available because only a few patients who will benefit are currently offered this potentially life-saving option".
New rules in the UK have been introduced that should increase the number of patients being offered weight loss surgery.
source: bbcnews
Comments
Post a Comment