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...
US researchers have developed molten glass sewing machine by combining 3D printing of glass with a mathematical model
When the nozzle releasing a stream of molten glass is raised above a certain level, that thread begins to wobble. It traces out waves or loops - which the team found could be controlled by adjusting the speed of the nozzle. Those shapes then become the building blocks for intricate, 3D objects. Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pioneered a method for glass 3D printing in 2015. They then started to work with mathematician Pierre-Thomas Brun, who has studied the fluid dynamics of liquid "ropes". The results are documented in a video, which the team presented in the American Physical Society's "Gallery of Fluid Motion" in November.It all started with a collaboration between two labs at MIT, Dr Brun told - one specialising in glass and the other in "mediated matter"."Normally when you 3D print, the nozzle is very close to the piece that you're printing - that's the conventional method. But what they started worki...