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...
Among the goals of the venture, formed earlier this year, will be to catch neutrino particles streaming towards us from a supernova - an exploding star. Such events occur about every 30 years, but the neutrino streams they produce have not been studied in detail. Dune (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment) will be hosted at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. It will involve the development of the world's most high-intensity beam of neutrinos, which will travel 1,300km (800mi) underground from Fermilab towards a massive detector instrument based at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. The venture is the product of a merger between European and US projects with similar aims. The international collaboration held its inaugural meeting at Fermilab in April. "There has been a process since last summer to prepare the ground for this collaboration, based on bringing together the US and European projects. There are now 700 people signed ...