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 helium plasma - a cloud of loose, charged particles - lasted just a tenth of a second and was about one million degrees Celsius. It was hailed as a breakthrough for the Max Planck Institute's stellarator - a chamber whose design differs from the tokamak fusion devices used elsewhere. The Sun's energy is created by fusion. Physicists are in a worldwide race to create stable fusion devices that could not only mimic the Sun but release abundant energy, without the volumes of toxic waste generated by nuclear fission - the splitting of the atom.The team at Greifswald, in northeastern Germany, aim in future to heat hydrogen nuclei to about 100 million C - the necessary conditions for fusion to take place like in the Sun's interior. They will use deuterium, a heavier type, or isotope, of the element. The stellarator's plasma was created on Thursday using a microwave laser, a complex combination of magnets and just 10mg of helium. The Max Planck Institute call...