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 new assessment adds further fuel to a debate on how dinosaurs were doing when a 10km-wide space rock slammed into Earth 66 million years ago. A team suggests the creatures were in long-term decline because they could not cope with the ways Earth was changing. The study appears in PNAS journal. Researchers analysed the fossil remains of dinosaurs from the point they emerged 231 million years ago up to the point they went extinct. To begin with, new species evolved at an explosive rate. But things started to slow about 160 million years ago, leading to a decline in the number of species which commences at about 120 million years ago.Dr Manabu Sakamoto, a palaeontologist from the University of Reading, who led the research, said: "We were not expecting this result." "Even though they were wiped out ultimately by the impact of the asteroid, they were actually already on their way out around 50 million years before the asteroid hit." Dr Sakamoto's a...