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...
Bears feast and gain weight in the warm months, ready for the big winter doze. In faecal samples from 16 wild bears, scientists found a bug population that was more suited to depositing fat in summer, and burning it in winter. And when transplanted into lab mice, the "summer" bacteria caused greater fat gain than the "winter" ones. The research is published in the journal Cell Reports. Senior author Fredrik Bäckhed, from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said it was not a huge surprise to see gut flora change with the seasons - but this is the first time anyone has revealed a role for these different bugs in the energy metabolism of a hibernating animal. "We know that the microbiota is very responsive to what we eat," he told."So if a bear eats a lot in the summer and it doesn't eat in the winter, then there should be an altered microbiota. What we learn from our study is that it appears that the altered microbiome can contribut...