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 ancient reptiles are preserved in "superb detail" down to scales of skin, the tip of a tongue and tiny claws. Two of the fossils are related to modern-day chameleons and geckos, revealing how features such as sticky toe-pads evolved. The lizards inhabited tropical forests in what is now Myanmar during the Mid-Cretaceous Period. Researchers in the US have published their assessment of the specimens in the journal Science Advances. "The fossilised amber provides a view into a lost world, revealing that the tropics of the Mid-Cretaceous contained a diverse lizard fauna," Dr Edward Stanley of the Florida Museum of Natural History. Some of the lizards are representatives of modern groups such as geckos, while others have no modern equivalent and eventually died out. One of the fossils appears to be a transitional form between the "standard" lizard form and chameleons, said Dr Stanley. "This 'missing-link' is roughly 80 million ...