(CNN) — It wasn’t until he moved near to an airfield in the UK over a decade ago that mechanical engineer Ashok Aliseril Thamarakshan began to seriously consider learning to fly a
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For over 500 years, Michelangelo’s sculpture of David in Florence has stood unchanged, the marble icon of masculinity, and one of the world’s most famous works of art.
But as Italy emerges from the pandemic, the David has got a whole new look.
A new lighting system has revolutionized how the famous statue looks, with small details visible for the first time in its history.
“A few days ago, I noticed muscles on the body that I’d never seen before,” says Lucia Lazic, a guide who visits the Accademia Gallery most days.
“I said, ‘What on earth? How have I never seen this?’ The lighting is much better on the David.”
Cecilie Hollberg, director of the Accademia, said in a statement that the lighting has “changed the visual perception of the artworks,” telling CNN that the David’s marble looks “whiter” and that the details are “more visible.”
The lighting – completed in September as part of works that were unveiled this week – aimed to bring the “dynamism of sunlight” into the Tribuna room where the statue is kept under a domed skylight.
LED spotlights were installed in a circle above the statue, allowing them to “completely envelop the David and leave the rest of the space in the background.”
The color of the light changes imperceptibly during the day, while the spotlights are of varying warmth, allowing visitors to get a new perspective with every step around the statue.
The new-look David is part of a wider revamp of the museum, which was Italy’s second most visited in 2019.
The Galleria dei Prigioni, or “prisoners corridor” – named after Michelangelo’s four semi-finished sculptures of prisoners of war, which share the space with two of his other works – has also had its lighting switched up, with several spotlights pointed on each sculpture.
“It used to be that the prisoners looked yellow, and David was white. Now they’re the same color,” Hollberg told CNN.
“You can now see every chisel mark on them.”
The new lighting system, which “restores the right balance of chiaroscuro and color to the works,” is also energy-efficient. Hollberg says the gallery should use around 80% less electricity than in previous years.
It’s not just the headline works that are looking different. Several of the other rooms of the gallery have had their previously beige walls painted in colors that maximize those in the paintings.
The Sala del Colosso, the gallery’s first room, is now a bright blue, while the 13th and 14th-century rooms are a pale green, chosen to bring out the gold used in most of the paintings.
And the new lighting everywhere has transformed the paintings from things tourists used to rush past en route to David, to unmissable in their own right.
“One regular visitor said, ‘Where was all this detail? We never saw it,’” Hollberg told CNN. “In one painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio you can now see all the gold dots in the [saints’] halos. Before, the beige walls flattened the gold. In another, it feels like you could pluck the pearls from the painting – before you couldn’t see them at all.
“My job is to give value and visibility to all the works. Every single work here is a masterpiece, but works die on a beige background – they need to be lifted and supported by color. I want to give them what they deserve.”
In the past, the lighting was so bad that some paintings were barely visible – like those beside the David. “Before it was all dark, you couldn’t see them – no one stopped,” said Hollberg. One time she saw a guide shining their phone torch on another painting in a bid to show it to visitors.
Tourists have already changed their behavior, she said.
“Now they stop and look. They’re not all in front of the David like before. I’ve followed groups, and they used to cut through the Sala del Colosso and never stop. Now I see that room full of visitors – it’s redistributing the crowds.”
Lazic, a guide with Elite Italian Experience, agrees: “There are more people stopping in the Sala del Colosso.”
The renovations, which started just before the pandemic and which have been rolled out this year, have finished with the revamp of the Gipsoteca. The plaster cast gallery was another rush-through place. That’s if it was open – with no open windows or air conditioning, it used to close at midday during the summer.
But now with air conditioning, powder blue walls and a new layout for the 414 plaster casts – mostly done by sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini, whose works are found in the Louvre, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art – it’s a place to linger.
Hollberg says that locals are starting to appreciate the museum, too. “Before it was a space for tourists, but Florentines are rediscovering it. We got the last resisters in with a concert series.”
Dario Franceschini, Italy’s minister of culture, called the reopening of the Gipsoteca “an important step… in bringing [the Accademia] into the 21st century.”
He added: “The works across the entire building have allowed significant innovations in the systems, transforming a museum conceived in the late 19th century into a modern venue without distorting it.”
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To tackle Thailand’s mounting trash problem, one company is turning to the country’s plant life.
Universal Biopack makes packaging that it sells to restaurants and manufacturers. But rather than plastic, it uses a mixture of bamboo and cassava, crops that are widely found across the country.
After growing rapidly in recent decades, Thailand has become one of Asia’s biggest economies. But like many other countries in the region, it’s been slow to try to combat the millions of tons of trash produced each year.
“Waste management is a big problem everywhere,” said Universal Biopack’s managing director, Vara-Anong Vichakyothin.
Related: The company turning 4 billion plastic bottles into clothes
The company is using a technology devised at a Bangkok university to make its zero-waste packaging. It hopes it will eventually replace many of the Styrofoam boxes and plastic bags that end up in huge garbage dumps across Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries.
Its eco-friendly formula took five years to develop and is so adaptable it could end up being used to package things like furniture and even phones. The bamboo it uses comes from leftover scraps from the chopstick manufacturing process.
In the cities of Bangkok and Chiang Mai, where takeout drink containers and noodle packets line the sidewalks, the company supplies restaurants, organic farmers and other businesses in the food and drink industry.
But finding new clients can be tricky.
Takeout food vendors in Thailand want to keep costs down in a competitive business with thin margins. Asking them to spend more on packaging for environmental reasons is a tough sell.
“The local economy still does not support [this technology]” said Universal Biopack’s founder, Suthep Vichakyothin.
But that hasn’t stopping other companies from entering the sustainable packaging market in Thailand. Like Universal Biopack, they’re betting on growing environmental awareness eventually leading to an increase in demand.
To become more competitive, Suthep’s company is investing. It’s aiming to ramp up production by building a partially automated assembly line at its factory near Bangkok and doubling its staffing from 50 people to 100.
The goal is to increase monthly capacity from 300,000 units to one million.
Related: A startup that makes pencils that grow into vegetables
A lot of the demand comes from overseas. One of its customers uses the natural packaging for coconut water it exports.
Universal Biopack says it’s also getting interest in its products from other countries, particularly in Scandinavia.
CNNMoney (Hong Kong) First published February 12, 2017: 9:08 PM ET
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Lewis Hamilton may be Formula One’s most successful driver but after securing a record-equaling seventh world title on Sunday the Briton said he still had plenty left to achieve – namely making his sport and the world “more diverse and inclusive.”
A brilliant drive during a rain-soaked Turkish Grand Prix ensured Hamilton not only won the race – for a record-extending 94th Grand Prix victory – but also equaled Michael Schumacher’s tally of seven world titles, the one remaining record of the German great that the Englishman has not yet surpassed.
In an Instagram post after his historic feat, Hamilton said the coronavirus pandemic had given him a chance to “really think about my ultimate purpose.”
“Seven World Championships means the world to me, I can’t even describe how much, but there’s still another race we’ve yet to win,” the post read.
“This year I’ve been driven not just by my desire to win on the track, but by a desire to help push our sport, and our world to become more diverse and inclusive. I promise you I am not going to stop fighting for change. We have a long way to go but I will continue to push for equality within our sport, and within the greater world we live in.
“Equaling Michael Schumacher’s record puts a spotlight on me that I know won’t be here forever. So, while you’re here, paying attention, I want to ask everyone to do their part in helping to create a more equal world. Let’s be more accepting and kinder to each other. Let’s make it so that opportunity is not something that is dependent on background or skin colour.”
No driver in the sport’s history has won as many races, secured as many pole positions or finished on the podium as many times as Hamilton. He is widely expected to add to his tally of world titles – saying on the podium after the race that he felt “like I’m only just getting started” – and his place in F1’s pantheon has long since been assured.
He is the face of F1, but also its voice and conscience and has used his stature like no other F1 world champion. F1’s first and only Black world champion in its 70-year history, this year he became one of sport’s leading voices in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
With Hamilton being a force for change, Mercedes – famous for its silver livery – unveiled an all-black car for this season in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, with the drivers wearing black uniforms and the halos of both cars featuring the call to “End Racism.”
The Briton’s own incredible story – his father, Anthony, juggled three jobs, re-mortgaged the family home and dipped into his life savings to keep his son in karting – is an example of how notoriously difficult the sport is to enter, mainly because of the financial costs involved.
Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Hamilton said: “It is no secret that I have walked this sport alone as the only person of color here.
“The fact is I am bi-racial … and there is colorism that people should perhaps read about.
“When I was younger I didn’t have anybody in the sport that looked like me so it was easy to think that’s not possible to get there because nobody of your colour has ever been there, you don’t see any Black people in F1.
“But hopefully this sends a message to the kids that are watching … that it doesn’t matter where you come from, whatever your background, it is so important to you to dream big.
“You can create your own path and that is what I have been able to do, and it has been so tough. Tough doesn’t even describe how hard it has been.”
Immediately after the race, Hamilton sat in his car with his head buried in his hands and struggled to hold back the tears.
“Very rarely do I lose control of my emotions but I remember those last few laps and I was just telling myself to keep it together,” Hamilton told reporters.
“When I came across the line it really hit me and I just burst into tears.
“I didn’t want the visor to come up and people to see the tears because I always would say you will never see me cry. I remember watching other drivers cry in the past, and I was like, I am never going to do that, but it was too much.”
Hamilton needed to finish eight points ahead of his teammate Valtteri Bottas to secure the title at Istanbul Park. He did so with ease, lapping the Finn who crossed the line in 14th to collect zero points.
Driving in the same Mercedes machinery, Bottas’ performance illustrated just how superior a talent Hamilton is. No one has come close to challenging the world champion during this truncated season and he secured the title with three races still remaining, having won four races in a row and 10 of 14 races so far this year.
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Shane Kimbrough is a NASA astronaut
He voted in the 2016 election
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From infinity and beyond, he found a way to vote.
Shane Kimbrough, a NASA astronaut currently living on board the International Space Station, filed his ballot in Tuesday’s presidential election, according to a Tumblr post by NASA.
NASA told Yahoo News that Kimbrough filed his ballot in the 2016 election from the space station sometime over the past few days.
For astronauts who will be in space on Election Day, the voting process starts a year before launch. At that time, they are able to select the elections in which they want to participate.
Then, six months before the election, astronauts are provided with the form “Voter Registration and Absentee Ballot Request – Federal Post Card Application.”
NASA astronaut David Wolf was the first American to vote in space while on the Russian Mir Space Station in a 1997 local election, according to NPR.
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(CNN) — It wasn’t until he moved near to an airfield in the UK over a decade ago that mechanical engineer Ashok Aliseril Thamarakshan began to seriously consider learning to fly a plane.
He got his first taste of flying a few years later, when his wife Abhilasha bought him a 30-minute flight experience for his birthday.
Aliseril, who is based in English county Essex, booked in some flying lessons at a local airfield and flew to the Isle of Wight, an island off the south coast of England, during his first session.
“That was quite an eye opener into how it [flying] gives you the freedom to just go places if you have that ability, and access to an aircraft,” he tells CNN Travel. “So that really got me hooked.”
Aliseril got his private pilot’s license in 2019 and soon began hiring planes for short flights.
Amateur build
Engineer Ashok Aliseril spent 18 months building a four-seater plane during the pandemic, helped by his daughter Tara.
Courtesy Ashok Thamarakshan
But as his family grew — he and Abhilasha now have two daughters, the two-seater planes typically available for private hire became even less suitable, and he began to mull over the idea of buying his own plane.
Aliseril briefly considered buying an older aircraft, and looked at some that had been built in the 1960s and 1970s.
However, he says he felt uneasy about the prospect of flying his family in an older aircraft that he wasn’t familiar with, and didn’t think it would be a “comfortable journey.”
Aliseril began to look into the possibility of building a plane himself, reasoning that this would allow him to gain a better understanding of the aircraft so that it would be easier to maintain in the long term.
After researching self-assembly aircraft kits, he came across a four-seater plane manufactured by South African company Sling Aircraft that ticked all the right boxes.
In January 2020, Aliseril flew to the Sling Aircraft factory facility in Johannesburg for the weekend in order to take the Sling TSi aircraft on a test flight and was so impressed that he decided to purchase it.
“This was pre Covid, where travel was still very easy at the time,” he explains. “I ordered the first kit when I got back. And by the time it arrived, the UK was in full lockdown.”
Aliseril says his colleagues, some of whom had experience with building aircraft, initially offered to help with the build. But the restrictions brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, which had spread across the world by this point, meant that this wasn’t possible.
Home assembly
Aliseril’s home improvement experience came in handy while constructing the four-seater Sling TSi aircraft.
Courtesy Ashok Thamarakshan
Undeterred, he constructed a small shed in his back garden and planned out the different stages of the project, which would be monitored by the Light Aircraft Association, a UK representative body that oversees the construction and maintenance of home-built aircraft, under an approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).
The rules for amateur built aircraft differ slightly from country to country. In the US, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has an experimental airworthiness category where special airworthiness certificates can be issued to kit built aircraft.
Amateur-built airplanes in the UK are investigated by the CAA, who will issue a “Permit to Fly” once satisfied that the aircraft is fit to fly.
Although the start of the build was delayed slightly due to the Covid-19 restrictions in place in the UK at the time — the Light Aircraft Association inspector assigned to the project was required to visit his working space beforehand — Aliseril was able to begin in April 2020.
While he notes that his engineering background helped in some ways, he believes that it was actually his home improvement experience that proved most useful while constructing the aircraft, which has a length of 7.175 meters and a height of 2.45 meters.
“These aircraft kits are designed for any amateur to build, provided you’re a bit hands-on and you’ve got experience working with some specialist tools,” he adds, describing the detailed “Ikea furniture type instructions” with drawings that came with the kit.
“I would say generally, anyone can get involved in these sorts of builds.”
Lockdown project
He built a shed in his garden to complete the build.
Courtesy Ashok Thamarakshan
Aliseril completed the work himself, drafting in Abhilasha to assist with some of the sections that required more than one pair of hands. Their eldest daughter Tara, now seven, was on hand for tasks such as removing the plastic from each of the components.
By the end of summer 2020, Aliseril had built the tail and the wings. He began constructing the fuselage section in October, when the next part of the kit arrived.
Although he’d initially planned to hire a workshop to construct the aircraft, Aliseril feels that creating a workspace at his home was the better choice.
“I could just step into the shed and work on it,” he says. “So having everything just in the back garden really helped, even though space was tight.”
Each stage of the project had to be signed off by an inspector before he could move onto the next task — the Light Aircraft Association completed around 12 inspections in total.
Once the majority of the components were constructed, and it was time to put the aircraft together, Aliseril moved everything from his home to a hangar near Cambridge for the final assembly and engine fit. The aircraft passed its final inspection a few months later.
It was one of the first Sling TSi homebuilt aircraft constructed in the UK. G-Diya, named after his youngest daughter, was signed off for its first flight in January 2022.
Aliseril recalls waiting on the ground anxiously as a test pilot took the plane he’d spent 18 months building up into the air.
Taking flight
The aircrraft, which has a range of 1,389 kilometers, was issued with a permit to fly back in May.
Courtesy Ashok Thamarakshan
“He took it up for about 20 minutes, and then he came back,” he says. “It was a big relief. I couldn’t lift my head up to see what was happening [during the test flight].”
That first flight was hugely significant in many ways.
“With these build projects, everyone calls it a project until it’s first flown,” he explains. “Once it’s flown, it’s always called an aircraft. You never call it a project anymore. That’s psychologically a big step.”
When it was time to fly the aircraft for the first time himself, Aliseril was accompanied by another experienced test pilot.
While he admits to being decidedly cautious, the test pilot was “throwing the aircraft about as if it was a racing car.”
“I was feeling very nervous, I didn’t want to put any extra stress on it,” Aliseril explains. “But he [the test pilot] was really pushing it to the limits. And it was good to experience that. I know that it [the aircraft] can handle this much.
“Once I landed, he [the test pilot] clapped his hands and said ‘Congratulations, you’ve just landed the plane you built.’ That was a great feeling.”
G-Diya, which has a range of 1,389 kilometers, went through a number of further test flights before it was issued with a permit to fly in May 2022.
The following weekend, Aliseril flew with his wife and daughters Diya and Tara, four, to the Isle of Wight, where they took a short taxi ride from the airfield to the beach.
“The kids were really happy,” he says. “So that sort of freedom. And the fact that we could just do that on a Saturday and still be back by 4 p.m. That was a great feeling.”
Over the past few months, Aliseril and his family have flown back to the Isle of Wight, and have also made trips to Skegness, a seaside town in eastern England and the village of Turweston in Buckinghamshire. They’ve been documenting their trips on Instagram.
In June 2022, he took a one-week trip around northern Europe with a pilot friend, and flew to the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany.
While Aliseril stresses that he’s still a relatively new pilot — he currently has around 125 hours of flying hours under his belt — his confidence is growing with every flight and he’s working towards flying to Europe with his family.
Family trips
“That’s the plan going forward,” he says. “We can take trips within the UK on a weekend, when the weather is good. And in the summer holidays, we can book out a week and then fly into Europe.”
For Aliseril, one of the main benefits of the plane, aside from the freedom it provides him and his family, is the friendships he’s formed with other pilots.
He was always mindful that owning an aircraft could become a financial burden, but has been able to get round this by working out an arrangement to share it with three others.
“To get your private license, it costs quite a bit,” he adds, before noting that many of those who’ve taken on similar projects are either retired, or are people “who have the time and financial status” to fund the process.
“I kind of knew that from the beginning, and thought I’d take that risk and try to do it myself,” he says. “I knew that once it was done, I would easily be able to find people to share that cost. And it’s worked out quite well [for me].”
Now that the aircraft is split equally between four people, “it’s only costing us around the price of an SUV,” adds Aliseril.
“It’s more fuel efficient in the air — it only takes about 20 liters of unleaded fuel per hour of flight,” he says. “So the fuel costs are pretty much equal to driving.”
There’s currently no hangar space at the airfields close to his home, so Aliseril is building a new hangar for the plane, which is still based near Cambridge, at an Essex airfield.
As for the cost of the build, the kit was priced at around £80,000 (about $91,000,) according to Aliseril, while added costs including avionics, as well as the plane’s Rotax engine, propeller and other supplies, brought the total up to around £180,000 (around $203,000).
He hopes that more young people will take on projects like this in the future, and points to shared aircraft ownership as a way to make things more cost efficient, as well as form connections in the aviation world.
“It becomes a communal thing,” he says. “You always have somebody to fly with if your family is not available. Also, having other pilots who are friends — you learn from each other.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story mixed up Aliseril’s eldest and youngest daughters. It also misstated the name of the Light Aircraft Association.
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