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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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An extinct armoured animals belongs within the family tree of modern armadillos,study of 12,000-year-old DNA

The glyptodonts roamed South America for millions of years until the last Ice Age, and some grew as big as cars.  Their physical attributes - notably an impenetrable shell - already placed them as likely cousins of armadillos.  Now, researchers say they are not even a sister group, but a subfamily.  "Glyptodonts should probably be considered a subfamily of gigantic armadillos," said Frederic Delsuc, from the National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) and Montpellier University in France.  Dr Delsuc and his colleagues used computer predictions to reconstruct some likely DNA sequences of armadillo ancestors, based on the genes of living species. They then made RNA "bait" based on these sequences and used it to fish for glyptodont DNA in a tiny, mashed-up sample of shell from a fossil in a Buenos Aires museum.This technique allows scientists to confidently identify real DNA sequences from the ancient target species, without worrying about contaminating ge...
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More than half of all tree species in the Amazon face extinction, warn international scientists

According to new data, up to 57% of all Amazonian trees may already fit the criteria of being globally threatened.  If confirmed, the estimates would raise the number of threatened plant species on Earth by almost a quarter.  Forest cover in the Amazon has been shrinking for decades, but little is known about the impact on individual plant species.  The trees at risk include iconic species like the Brazil nut tree, food crops such as cacao, the source of chocolate, as well as rare trees that are almost unknown to science.  The research, published in the journal, Science Advances, compared data from almost 1,500 forest plots with maps of current and predicted forest loss to estimate how many tree species have been lost and how many are likely to disappear by the middle of the century. It found that the Amazon - the world's most diverse forest - could be home to more than 15,000 tree species.  Of these, between 36% and 57% are likely to qualify as being g...
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Can trees resist wildfires?

Spanish researchers Bernabé and José Moya couldn't trust their eyes.  More than 20,000 hectares of backwoods were roasted. Be that as it may, amidst the annihilation, a gathering of cypresses was all the while standing tall and green.  At the point when a flame cleared through an exploratory plot in Andilla, in the Spanish area of Valencia in 2012, it gave analysts the ideal open door.  The plot, which was a piece of CypFire, an undertaking financed by the European Union, was built up amid the 1980s to test the resistance of more than 50 mixed bags of Mediterranean cypress to a pathogenic growth.  After the flame occasion of 2012, it additionally gave further narrative confirmation of the impossible to miss versatility of the species even with flame.  Botanist Bernabé Moya and his sibling, ecological specialist Jose  Moya, both from the branch of amazing trees in Valencia, had been included in the venture for quite a long while.  "On our a...
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