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...
Everyone surrounded by a unique "cloud" of millions of their own bacteria, by scientists at the University of Oregon in the US
Everyone is surrounded by a unique "cloud" of millions of their own bacteria, according to scientists at the University of Oregon in the US. Walk through someone else's cloud, and it will "rain" bacteria on your skin and be breathed into your lungs. The study on 11 people, published in the journal PeerJ, showed it was possible to identify people from their microbial miasma. One microbiologist said the findings were simply "gross". Studies have already shown that our microbiome - the collection of bacteria, viruses and fungi that live on our skin and in our bodies - outnumbers our own cells 10-to-one. These can be spread through direct contact, airborne emissions and shed skin cells in dust.People were kept in a sealed chamber for four hours with air pumped in through a filter to prevent contamination. Dishes and filters inside the chamber collected samples from the emanating cloud. One of the researchers, Dr James Meadow, said: "We...