Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label four

Solar plane lands in New York City

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...

Four elements added to the periodic table, completing the scheme's seventh row

They are the first to be included in the table since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were added.  The first true iteration of the table was produced in 1869 by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev.  The new additions were formally verified by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) on 30 December 2015.  The body announced that a team of Russian and American researchers had provided sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118.  IUPAC awarded credit for the discovery of element 113 to a Japanese team at the Riken Institute.  The teams responsible for the discoveries have been invited to come up with permanent names and chemical symbols for the now-confirmed elements.  "The chemistry community is eager to see its most cherished table finally being completed down to the seventh row. IUPAC has now initiated the process of formalising names and symbols for these elements," said Prof Jan Reedijk, president of ...

Puffins are among four UK bird species at risk of extinction, global conservation database

Puffins Atlantic puffins, European turtle doves, Slavonian grebes and pochards are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species for birds.  This means the number of UK species on the critical list has doubled to eight.  Puffins are vulnerable to pollution and declining food sources, ecologists say.  Another 14 UK species are considered to be "near threatened".  Martin Harper, conservation director with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), said the "global wave of extinction is now lapping at our shores".  "The erosion of the UK's wildlife is staggering and this is reinforced when you talk about puffin and turtle dove now facing the same level of extinction threat as African elephant and lion, and being more endangered than the humpback whale," he said.Although the Atlantic puffin population is still in the millions, fewer young birds are surviving to breed. Turtle dove Reasons...