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Terrafugia Inc .said Monday that its new flying car has completed its first flight,bringing the company closer to its goal of selling the flying car within the next year.The vehicle-named the Transition – has two seats，four wheels and wings that fold up so it can be driven like a car.The Transition,which flew at 1,400 feet for eight minutes last month, can reach around 70 miles per hour on the road and 115 in the flies using a 23-gallon tank of gas and burns 5 gallons per hour in the air. On the ground, it gets 35 miles per gallon.
Around 100 people have already put down a $10,000 deposit to get a Transition when they go on sale, and those numbers will likely rise after Terrafugia introduces the Transition to the public later this week at the New York Auto Show. But don't expect it to show up in too many driveways. It's expected to cost $279,000.And it won't help if you're stuck in traffic. The car needs a runway.
Inventors have been trying to make flying cars since the 1930s, according to Robert Mann, an airline industry expert. But Mann thinks Terrafugia has come closer than anyone to making the flying car a reality. The govemment has already permitted the company to use special materials to make it easier for the vehicle to fly. The Transition is now going through crash tests to make sure it meets federal safety standards.
Mann said Terrafugia was helped by the Federal Aviation Administration's decision five years ago to create a separate set of standards for light sport aircraft, which are lower than those for pilots of larger planes. Terrafugia says an owner would need to pass a test and complete 20 hours of flying time to be able to fly the Transition,a requirement pilots would find relatively easy to meet.
When a leafy plant is under attack ，it doesn't sit quietly. Back in 1983, two scientists, Jack Schultz and Ian Baldwin,reported that young maple trees getting bitten by insects send out a particular smell that neighboring plants can get. These chemicals come from the injured parts of the plant and seem to be an alarm.What the plants pump through the air is a mixture of chemicals known as volatile organic compounds,VOCs for short.
Scientists have found that all kinds of plants give out VOCs when being attacked .It's a plant's way of crying out.But is anyone listening?Apparently.Because we can watch the neighbours react.
Some plants pump out smelly chemicals to keep insects away.But others do double duty .They pump out perfumes designed to attract different insects who are natural enemies to the attackers. Once they arrive, the tables are turned. The attacker who was lunching now becomes lunch.
In study after study,it appears that these chemical conversations help the neighbors .The damage is usually more serious on the first plant,but the neighbors ,relatively speaking ,stay safer because they heard the alarm and knew what to do.
Does this mean that plants talk to each other? Scientists don't know. Maybe the first plant just made a cry of pain or was sending a message to its own branches, and so, in effect, was talking to itself. Perhaps the neighbors just happened to “overhear” the cry. So information was exchanged, but it wasn't a true, intentional back and forth.
Charles Darwin, over 150 years ago, imagined a world far busier, noisier and more intimate(亲密的) than the world we can see and hear. Our senses are weak. There's a whole lot going on.
