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...
Meat and tools, not the advent of cooking, was the trigger that freed early humans to develop a smaller chewing apparatus, a study suggests. This in turn may have allowed other changes, such as improved speech and even shifts in the size of the brain. The authors conclude that cooking became commonplace much later. Prof Daniel Lieberman and Dr Katherine Zink from Harvard University have published their work in the journal Nature. The earliest members of our genus, Homo, are only sparsely represented in the fossil record. By the time the species Homo erectus appeared about two million years ago, humans had evolved bigger brains and bodies that had increased our daily energy requirements. But paradoxically, they had also evolved smaller teeth, as well as weaker chewing muscles and bite force. They also had a smaller gut than earlier human ancestors. One of the possible reasons for these changes, cooking, did not become commonplace until 500,000 yea...