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...
The update contains a new data compression algorithm called Brotli, which Google first unveiled in September. It squishes the size of a website down by 26% more than Chrome's previous compression tool, Zopfli.Like Zopfli, the new algorithm is named after a Swiss baked good. (Brötli means 'small bread' in Swiss German.) In a Google+ post, Google engineer Ilya Grigorik announced that Brotli will be coming to Chrome soon, likely in the browser's next major update. "At Google, we think that internet users' time is valuable, and that they shouldn't have to wait long for a webpage to load," Google (GOOG) said in a September blog post, when it first announced Brotli. "Because fast is better than slow." Google made the code open-souce, meaning it can be used by any competing browser. Mozilla, for example, says it will use the code in Firefox. Chrome has been on a tear lately, adding features left and right that speed up your browsing