1 Solar plane completes world trip (Damian
Carrington in The Guardian) Solar Impulse 2 has completed the first
round-the-world flight by a solar-powered aeroplane, after touching down in Abu
Dhabi early on Tuesday.
The final leg of the feat, aimed at showcasing the
potential of renewable energy, was a bumpy one, with turbulence driven by hot
desert air leaving the solo pilot, Bertrand Piccard, fighting with the
controls.
The plane, which has a wingspan wider than a Boeing
747 and carries more than 17,000 solar cells on its wings, began the
circumnavigation in March 2015 in Abu Dhabi. It has since crossed both the
Pacific and Atlantic Oceans using no fossil fuel and has spent more than 23
days in the air.
Piccard said he was feeling emotional as he neared
the end of the journey: “It is a very, very special moment – it has been 15
years that I am working on this goal. I hope people will understand that it is
not just a first in the history of aviation, but also a first in the history of
energy,” he said.
“All the clean technologies we use, they can be used
everywhere. So we have flown 40,000km, but now it is up to other people to take
it further. It is up to every person in a house to take it further, every head
of state, every mayor in a city, every entrepreneur or CEO of a company.
During daylight, the solar panels charged the
plane’s batteries, which make up a quarter of the craft’s 2.3 tonne weight. The
pilot also climbed to 29,000 feet during the day and glided down to 5,000 feet
at night, to conserve power. The plane flies at about 30mph, although it can go
faster if the sun is bright.
Bertrand alternated with André Borschberg to fly the
16 legs of the journey, spending up to five days in the unheated and
unpressurised cabin, taking only short naps and with the single seat doubling
up as a toilet. Borschberg flew the longest leg, 4,000 miles over the Pacific
from Japan to Hawaii, smashing the record for the longest uninterrupted journey
in aviation history.
The aim of the Solar Impulse adventure was not to
develop solar-powered planes for widespread use, but to show the capabilities
of renewable energy.
2 ‘Superbook’ as the office-in-pocket (Khaleej
Times) A US-based startup has launched a smart laptop shell that turns your
Android smartphone into a complete laptop, making it more convenient and
affordable for people in developing countries like India and South Africa to
carry their office in their pocket - literally.
The shell, called ‘Superbook’ by Andromium, makes an
Android smartphone output look very much like a desktop environment. It is
essentially a "dumb terminal" - a notebook without a processor but
with a keyboard, battery, trackpad and display. Andromium launched this
ambitious product on Kickstarter - a website "designed to bring creative
projects to life" - and is available at $99.
Developed by Andrew Jiang and his team at Andromium,
Superbook provides a large screen, keyboard and multi-touch trackpad, more than
eight hours of battery and phone-charging capabilities. When plugged into an
Android smartphone, it launches an app that will deliver a full laptop
experience to its user.
According to Jiang, the app is essentially Android
Continuum that lets you work seamlessly, going from phone to notebook.
3 Dutch are the world’s tallest (Jonathan Amos on BBC)
When it comes to height, Dutch men and Latvian women tower over all other
nationalities, a new study confirms. The average Dutchman is now 183cm (6ft)
tall, while the average Latvian woman reaches 170cm (5ft 7in).
The research, published in the journal eLife, has
tracked growth trends in 187 countries since 1914. It finds Iranian men and
South Korean women have had the biggest spurts, increasing their height by an
average of more than 16cm (6in) and 20cm (8in).
In the UK, the sexes have gone up virtually in
parallel by about 11cm (4in). "Mr Average" in Britain is now 178cm
(5ft 10in) tall; Ms Average stands at 164cm (5ft 5in).
This contrasts for example with men and women in the
US, where the height of the nation's people started to plateau in the 1960s and
1970s. Over the century, they have seen increases of just 6cm and 5cm (a couple
of inches), respectively.
Indeed, Americans have tumbled down the rankings.
Back in 1914, they had the third tallest men and fourth tallest women on the
planet. Today they are in 37th and 42nd place. The height charts are now
utterly dominated by European countries, but the data would suggest that growth
trends in general in the West have largely levelled out.
The smallest men on the planet are to be found in
East Timor (160cm; 5ft 3in). The world's smallest women are in Guatemala, a
status they also held back in 1914. According to the survey data, a century ago
the average Guatemalan 18-year-old female was 140cm (4ft 7in). Today she has
still not quite reached 150cm (4ft 11in).
Some of the variation in height across the globe can
be explained by genetics, but the study's authors say our DNA cannot be the
dominant factor. Lead scientist Majid Ezzati said: "About a third of the
explanation could be genes, but that doesn't explain the change over time. Changes
over time and variations across the world are largely environmental. That's at
the whole population level versus for any individual whose genes clearly matter
a lot."
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