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Solar plane lands in New York City

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...

Google can scan millions of books for an online library, the US court of appeal ruled

The court rejected claims from a group of authors that Google Books violated their intellectual property rights.  Judges sided with an earlier ruling that the digital library was "fair use" and provided a public service.  Authors Guild executive director Mary Rasenberger said the decision was disappointing.  The Authors Guild and some individual writers filed the lawsuit in 2005, claiming the project infringed on copyright protection and authors' ability to make money from their work.  Google Books is a project to scan and digitise millions of books to allow users to search and read excerpts from them. Judge Pierre Leval wrote: "Google's division of the page into tiny  snippets is designed to show the searcher just enough context surrounding the searched term to help her evaluate whether the book falls within the scope of her interest (without revealing so much as to threaten the author's copyright interests)."Google said it would have faced b...

The UK's premier prize for science books has been won by Gaia Vince

Adventures in the Anthropocene is her record of the people and places she encountered on a huge global tour.  The book details how humans are altering the planet, but it also tells the stories of how we are learning to limit and cope with that change.  The Royal Society Winton Prize is worth £25,000 to the winner.  "Anthropocene" is the word used by many scientists to describe the epoch of humanity's profound influence on the Earth.  There are arguments over when our activities started to distort natural processes, but there is no doubting the effects today. Pollution, species loss, over-exploitation of water and mineral resources, and of course climate change. The list goes on. This is "the age we made".Gaia knew all the data from her job as a science reporter, but she wanted to see the impacts first-hand. So, she put on hold the nine-to-five existence and bought a one-way ticket to Kathmandu, to start a personal odyssey and directly sample some of the...