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...
Both male and female cordon-bleu birds bob up and down while singing to their mates. Now, using high-speed video cameras, a team from Japan and Germany has spotted a remarkable quick-step that the birds perform mid-hop during this display. The research appears in the open access journal Scientific Reports. Because each bird's dance became more vigorous if its mate was on the same perch, the team thinks the vibrations might be adding a tactile element to the courtship ritual. Alternatively, the rat-a-tat flourish might be a musical accompaniment to the bird's song, or a visual display - or it might be a wooing strategy that targets multiple senses. It's a really rare phenomenon that songbirds produce non-vocal sounds," said senior author Masayo Soma, from Hokkaido University in Japan. "Some species produce non-vocal sounds with their wings, but they usually don't use their feet."Non-singing birds are also known to perform elaborate dances that ca...