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...
Testing of the firm's first underwater data centre - dubbed Leona Philpot after a character in an Xbox game- has just been completed in an initiative dubbed Project Natick. Data centres are believed to consume up to 3% of the world's electricity, according to researchers. Large technology firms are keen to find energy efficient ways to store their increasing amounts of data. Microsoft said its reasons for experimenting with underwater data centres were twofold. Firstly, half the world's population is located within 125 miles (200km) of the coast so data centres in the sea would reduce latency - the time its takes data to travel from its source to customers. But there were also environmental reasons for the trial. Putting the data centre in the ocean eliminated the need for cooling and, in future, if such centres could be colocated with offshore renewable energy sources, they could also produce zero emissions, according to Microsoft.Its first underwater...