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...
Names have now been proposed for the four new chemical elements added to the periodic table in January. They are nihonium (with the symbol Nh), moscovium (Mc), tennessine (Ts), and oganesson (Og). Until now, the quartet have been referred to simply by the number of protons in each atom - 113, 115, 117 and 118, respectively. The elements are the first to be included in the famous table since 2011, and complete its seventh row. The names must go out to consultation for five months, but if there are no objections their confirmation should be a formality. This will come from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. All four elements are extreme - the synthetic creations of scientists. None of them exist in the natural state and were made by bombarding two smaller (albeit still very large) atomic nuclei together. Theory predicts there are "islands of stability" where ...