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Solar plane lands in New York City

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...
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Many urban areas fail superfast broadband test in UK

Hull, with an average of 12.4Mbps, is the UK's slowest city, according to comparison site uSwitch, which conducted the tests.  London and Edinburgh had average speeds of 22.4Mbps and 21Mbps respectively.  These speeds are likely to be low not because of lack of availability but because people have chosen not to take up faster services.  Government figures suggest superfast broadband - 24Mbps or higher - is now available to more than 90% of homes and businesses, with funding pledged to bring that total to 95% by 2017.  According to BT, its fibre services are available to 24 million home, but only 22% (5.5 million) have connected to them. Hull is the only UK city not served by BT's Openreach, which controls the telecoms network. Hull's independent supplier, KCOM, disputed the findings.  "We're rolling out ultrafast fibre to the home across Hull and East Yorkshire, which means speeds of 250Mbps are available to consumers right now," said a KCOM spokesman...
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The formal test begun on the technologies required to detect gravitational waves in space

Europe's Lisa Pathfinder (LPF) probe is engaging in a series of experiments roughly 1.5 million km from Earth.  The project has heightened interest, of course, because of the first sampling of the "cosmic ripples" made by ground-based detectors last September  A successful demo for LPF would pave the way for a fully operational orbiting observatory in the 2030s.  This would likely be known simply as Lisa - the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.  "It's a wonderful time right now," said Paul McNamara, the European Space Agency's (Esa) project scientist on Lisa Pathfinder.  "I've spent my entire career in this endeavour, and for years we were told - even ridiculed in some cases - that gravitational waves don't exist, or that we'd never find them. "Well, now we have found them, and we're about to take the next big, big step towards building a mission that could detect them in space.The Earth-bound laser interferometers sit...
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An annual blood test may cut ovarian cancer deaths by a fifth, doctors say

Ovarian tumours are often deadly as they are caught too late.  A 14-year study on 200,000 women, published in the Lancet, has been welcomed as a potentially landmark moment in cancer screening.  But the researchers and independent experts say it is still too soon to call for mass screening because of concerns about the analysis.  Ovarian cancer is difficult to pick up as symptoms, including abdominal pain, persistent bloating and difficulty eating, are common in other conditions.The UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening is one of the biggest clinical trials ever conducted and is supposed to give the definitive verdict on screening.  It monitored levels of a chemical called CA125 in women's blood. Doctors tracked changes in the levels of CA125, which is produced by ovarian tissue, over time and if levels became elevated then the women were sent for further tests and ultimately surgery.  The results are now in, but the interpretation is a ...
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New heart attack test 'cuts A&E visits, say doctors

They say the rapid test, which looks for a chemical in the blood, would reduce stress for patients, save money and ease pressure on hospital wards.  Trials on 6,304 people, published in the Lancet medical journal, suggested it was 99.6% accurate.  The British Heart Foundation said the test would produce faster answers without affecting patient safety.  About one million people attend A&E departments in the UK with chest pain, only for most of them to be sent home after a sometimes lengthy and anxious stay.  They have levels of troponin, a chemical released by damaged heart muscle, tested when they are admitted and again 12 hours later. The new test also looks for troponin, but can detect much lower  levels and needs to be done only once. So those given the all-clear can go straight home.The study, led by the University of Edinburgh and taking place in Scottish and US hospitals, estimated that two-thirds of patients could be discharged much mor...
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