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...
South African physicist Neil Turok gave a speech in which he declared his wish that the next Einstein would be from Africa
It was a rallying call for investment in maths and physics research in Africa. The "Next Einstein" slogan became a mission for the organisation Neil Turok had founded to bring Africa into the global scientific community: the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS). That search for an African Einstein now has some results, with 15 "Next Einstein Fellows" and 54 "Next Einstein Ambassadors" announced at an event last month. These are young African scientists, often leaders in their fields, working and studying in Africa."Einstein is a natural, easy role model for people to look at - not just because he was a spectacular scientist, but also he thought about the way we should care for social justice as well as science," says the 36-year-old South African cosmologist Amanda Weltman, speaking to the BBC Discovery programme. Her work on the Chameleon field, a way to explain the accelerated expansion of the universe, is seen as a cont...