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...
Scientists who discovered the fossil have dubbed it the "kite runner". Ten capsules tethered to its back appear to contain juvenile progeny, all at different stages of development. Reported in the journal PNAS, the many-legged, eyeless, 1cm animal is not directly related to any living species. "There isn't an animal today that it's essentially related to," David Legg, a palaeontologist from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, told. "It's what we refer to as being on a stem lineage. So it belongs to a group that would have evolved and diversified before the modern groups did." In fact, Dr Legg added, although it clearly had the segmented body and exoskeleton of an arthropod, it was quite a job to figure out precisely where to position the little beast on the evolutionary tree. "Often you can look at a particular animal and say, that belongs to this group or that group. This one - we had no clue."The fossil ...