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...
They were investigating how the 4mm-long insect decides when to pounce. Apparently the flies are not much good at judging the size of a target, so they use a strategy based partly on how fast a potential meal is buzzing past. That means the researchers could trick the flies into going for targets that were far too big, but further away and faster-moving than expected. The experiments, published in the journal Brain, Behaviour and Evolution , used a species called Coenosia attenuata, which is so good at killing other airborne critters - including fruit flies - that organic farmers use it as a biological control mechanism. C. attenuata is an unfussy eating machine, explained Dr Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido - and that was partly why she started to study the little predators. It didn't look like they have a template for what they're looking for," she told. They go after things that are very slow, after things that are fast, after things that are white, th...