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...
Until now, it was thought features of human sleep such as rapid eye movements were seen only in mammals and birds. Now, a study of the bearded dragon - a popular pet - suggests these distinctive sleep rhythms emerged hundreds of million of years ago in a distant ancestor. They could even have been present in dinosaurs, say scientists. Some form of sleep has been described in everything from worms to people. But the sleep phases of humans and birds are very distinctive, involving cycles of deep (slow-waGerman researchers recorded the brain activity of bearded dragons when they were sleeping. They found that similar to humans and other mammals, the reptiles showed cycles of eye movements and deep sleep. However, while humans typically go through four or five 90-minute cycles of slow-wave sleep and REMs, the lizard sleep rhythm is faster and more regular, resulting in hundreds of much shorter cycles. And in lizards the activity seems to originate ...