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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...
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Designer cells reverse one-year-old's cancer

One-year-old Layla Richards, from London, had incurable aggressive leukaemia only five months ago.  Doctors used "designer immune cells" to fight the cancer and say her improvement was "almost a miracle".  It is too soon to know if she has been cured, but her progress already marks a huge moment for the field.  Layla was three months old when she was diagnosed with the condition.  As often happens with very young babies, chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant failed to cure her.Doctors had nothing left to offer and, the day before her first birthday, her family were advised to go through palliative care.  But Layla's dad Ashleigh refused to give up. He told "I didn't want to go down that road, I'd rather that she tried something new and I took the gamble. "And this is her today standing laughing and giggling, she was so weak before this treatment, it was horrible and I'm just thankful for this opportunity."Dr Paul Veys,...
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A new design for lithium-air batteries overcomes several big hurdles

Lithium-air cells can store energy much more densely than today's lithium-ion batteries, making them particularly promising for electric cars.  The design, published in Science, uses a spongy graphene electrode and a new chemical reaction to drive the cell.  It loses much less energy and can be recharged many more times than previous attempts at lithium-air batteries.  The hope for lithium-air batteries is that they will take in regular air to fuel the chemical reaction that releases electricity: lithium ions move from the positive electrode to the negative one, where they are oxidised.  At present the engineers behind the new effort, at the University of Cambridge, have only made laboratory test units which operate in pure oxygen, rather than air. In a first, however, the prototypes can operate when that oxygen is  moist.  "What we really want is a lithium-air battery - one that just takes in air, without having to remove CO2, nitrogen and water,"...
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A prototype patch could repair the damage caused by a heart attack, scientists say

A prototype patch could help the repair the damage caused by a heart attack, scientists say.  The early work, carried out on mice and pigs, reveals the protein-infused patch encourages the growth of healthy cells and leads to less scarring.  Scarring can be common after a heart attack, making the heart pump less effectively and sometimes fail.  Writing in the journal Nature, researchers say the patch may one day revolutionise treatment.  During an attack, muscle cells in the heart die because of a lack of blood flow and scientists believe repairing or replacing some of these cells may help reduce long-term damage. In this trial an international team of researchers soaked a collagen  patch in a protein known as Fstl1 and stitched it on to the hearts of animals who had experienced heart attacks.  Though the protein occurs naturally in healthy hearts, it becomes depleted in a key layer of the heart after an attack.  Two weeks later the hearts...
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