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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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Change in sense of humour could be a sign of impending dementia

The University College London study involved patients with frontotemporal dementia, with the results appearing in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.  Questionnaires from the friends and family of the 48 patients revealed many had noticed a change in humour years before the dementia had been diagnosed. This included laughing inappropriately at tragic events.  Experts say more studies are now needed to understand how and when changes in humour could act as a red flag for dementia.  There are many different types of dementia and frontotemporal dementia is one of the rarer ones.  The area of the brain it affects is involved with personality and behaviour, and people who develop this form of dementia can lose their inhibition, become more impulsive and struggle with social situations.Dr Camilla Clark and colleagues recruited 48 patients from their dementia clinic at University College London.  And they asked the friends or relatives of the patients to rat...
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Plant uses raindrops to eat ants, biologists discovered

Plant uses raindrops to eat ants The team, from the University of Bristol, found that raindrops kick off very fast vibrations in the lid of the plant's jug-shaped leaves. This propels ants from the lid into the pitcher trap below, where they drown and are consumed by digestive juices. The findings, published in the journal PNAS, are based on high-speed cameras and laser vibration measurements. Using these instruments, Dr Ulrike Bauer and her colleagues recorded extremely fast movement in the lid of the pitcher leaf, after it was hit by a raindrop. Having a fast movement in a plant is unusual in itself, but having one that doesn't require the plant to invest any energy... that's something quite surprisingDr Ulrike Bauer, University of Bristol It wobbles like a stiff spring, she said. "You have a raindrop hitting the surface and that causes it to move down, fast. Then because of this spring property, it moves to a certain point and springs back. "You ge...
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Everyone surrounded by a unique "cloud" of millions of their own bacteria, by scientists at the University of Oregon in the US

Everyone is surrounded by a unique "cloud" of millions of their own bacteria, according to scientists at the University of Oregon in the US.  Walk through someone else's cloud, and it will "rain" bacteria on your skin and be breathed into your lungs.  The study on 11 people, published in the journal PeerJ, showed it was possible to identify people from their microbial miasma.  One microbiologist said the findings were simply "gross".  Studies have already shown that our microbiome - the collection of bacteria, viruses and fungi that live on our skin and in our bodies - outnumbers our own cells 10-to-one.  These can be spread through direct contact, airborne emissions and shed skin cells in dust.People were kept in a sealed chamber for four hours with air pumped in through a filter to prevent contamination. Dishes and filters inside the chamber collected samples from the emanating cloud. One of the researchers, Dr James Meadow, said: "We...
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