Word: flighting
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...psychiatrist and aeronaut, knows a thing or two about high-altitude derring-do. In 1999, he and a partner, Brian Jones, became the first people to circumnavigate the earth in a balloon, but it rankled Piccard that doing so required burning nearly four tons of propane gas. "The balloon flight was a personal dream, the last thing to write in the history books before the end of the 20th century," says Piccard, whose father and grandfather were legendary ballooning and diving adventurers. "This project is more difficult and more useful: we want to share a state of mind...
Engineers and environmentalists will watch Solar Impulse with interest, since it offers a rigorous testing platform for extracting maximal power from minimal energy. A recently unveiled prototype, HB-SIA, which will begin flight-testing next year before the larger plane is built for 2011, is a marvel of optimization. Its 200 ft. (61 m) wingspan is covered with photovoltaic cells, which convert the sun's rays into roughly the same amount of energy needed to light a large Christmas tree. That solar power drives four electric engines, and loads four lithium batteries - a quarter of the aircraft's total weight...
...challenge, says Piccard, is to keep going until the next sunrise before the batteries are empty: "We have very little margin of error from night into day. Each dawn will be a moment of incredible suspense." For the 2011 flight, he and Boschberg will do alternating stints of five days and five nights between landings. A day on the ground spent charging in the sunlight should be enough to get the plane back into the air the next morning for another stage in its globe-girdling journey...
...very model of a modern Asian nation. Buoyed by oil revenue, capital Kuala Lumpur bristles with skyscrapers and industrial parks, while a massive administrative capital called Putrajaya has risen from what were palm-oil plantations two decades ago. In September, Malaysia's first astronaut blasted into space, his flight mirroring the nation's ambitions. Poverty has been reduced from half the population at independence to just 5% today, as an affirmative-action policy created a prosperous Malay middle class that had never before existed. In Asia, only the nations of Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Brunei rank higher than Malaysia...
...craftsmanship and authenticity are exactly what sake drinkers seek. "People want authentic experiences," Sidel says. "When they buy sake, they want a piece of Japanese culture." Not being able to read the label, however, is like walking blindfolded off a flight to Tokyo: you may have arrived, but you won't get very far. For Americans, part of the intimidation factor with sake selection is not only lack of exposure but also those pesky Japanese characters. Even after four years of college-level Japanese, Sidel couldn't read the labels, so he has tried to carve out what he calls...