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...
The universe is expanding faster than previously believed, a surprising discovery that could test part of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, a pillar of cosmology that has withstood challenges for a century. The discovery that the universe is expanding 5 percent to 9 percent faster than predicted, announced in joint news releases by NASA and the European Space Agency, also stirs hypotheses about what fills the 95 percent of the cosmos that emits no light and no radiation, scientists said on Thursday. "Maybe the universe is tricking us," said Alex Filippenko, a University of California, Berkeley astronomer and co-author of an upcoming paper about the discovery. The universe's rate of expansion does not match predictions based on measurements of the remnant radiation left over from the Big Bang explosion that gave rise to the known universe 13.8 billion years ago. One possibility for the discrepancy is that the universe has unknown subatomic particles, ...