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...
One-year-old Layla Richards, from London, had incurable aggressive leukaemia only five months ago. Doctors used "designer immune cells" to fight the cancer and say her improvement was "almost a miracle". It is too soon to know if she has been cured, but her progress already marks a huge moment for the field. Layla was three months old when she was diagnosed with the condition. As often happens with very young babies, chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant failed to cure her.Doctors had nothing left to offer and, the day before her first birthday, her family were advised to go through palliative care. But Layla's dad Ashleigh refused to give up. He told "I didn't want to go down that road, I'd rather that she tried something new and I took the gamble.
"And this is her today standing laughing and giggling, she was so weak before this treatment, it was horrible and I'm just thankful for this opportunity."Dr Paul Veys, from Great Ormond Street, said the transformation was one of the most remarkable things he'd seen in 20 years: "We're in a wonderful place compared to where we were five months ago, but that doesn't mean cure. "The only way we will find out if this is a cure is by waiting that one or two years, but even having got this far from where we were is a major, major step."
He described the run of events as "almost like a miracle". Layla's story is being presented at the American Society of Haematology, but this is only a single case that has not been tested in a clinical trial. But the pace of progress in gene-editing technology is phenomenal. Prof Waseem Qasim, from Great Ormond Street, added: "This is the first time human cells, engineered in this particular way, have been given back to a patient and that was a big step for us.
"The technology is moving very fast, the ability to target very specific regions of the genome have suddenly become much more efficient and we think that this technology will be the next phase of treatments.
"The technology itself has got enormous potential to correct other conditions where cells are engineered and given back to patients or to provide new properties to cells that allow them to be used in a way we can only imagine at the moment."
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