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...
Apps that regularly check for updates consume about 30% of the battery power an Android phone loses when in that mode, say the researchers. They have created a free Hush tool that lets only the most-used apps check in while the phone is off. Hush can cut power loss from the apps by almost half, say the team. Hush was created by engineers from Purdue University in Indiana after they carried out a large-scale study of energy use on Android smartphones. The analysis of power-consumption patterns on 2,000 handsets found that a lot of energy was wasted by badly written apps that did not let a phone go back into a sleep state after they checked for updates, said Prof Y Charlie Hu from Purdue. "They are not letting the phone go back to sleep because of software bugs and, specifically, due to the incorrect use of Android power control application programming interfaces called wakelocks," he said in a statement. The first versions of the Hush tool did a better job of handlin...
