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 birds helped Charles Darwin refine his theory of evolution going extinct, according to a new study
Finches in the Galapagos Islands are being threatened by a parasitic fly that attacks their young. A new mathematical model suggests that the birds may succumb to this pest in 50 years. But the authors say that human intervention could alleviate the risk of extinction. During his time on the Galapagos in the early 1830s, Charles Darwin noticed that finches on different islands in the chain were quite similar but had large variations in their beaks, depending on the local food source. Because the islands - which belong to Ecuador - are so far from the mainland, Darwin concluded that the birds had begun as one species and then started to evolve into separate varieties of finch. There are between 14 and 18 species on the Galapagos - but this study looked at one of the most common, the medium ground finch. Around 270,000 of these birds are found on Santa Cruz island.The finches are threatened by a nest fly which lays parasitic larvae in their nests which...