In this task, you are given news articles and you need to generate a highlight, i.e., a short summary, with a maximum length of 10 lines.

Q: SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN)  -- Imagine collecting thousands of empty plastic bottles, lashing them together to make a boat and sailing the thing from California to Australia, a journey of 11,000 miles (17,700 km) through treacherous seas. This 60-foot sailboat, the Plastiki, is being built from more than 12,000 recycled plastic bottles. You'd have to be crazy, or trying to make a point. David de Rothschild is trying to make a point. De Rothschild hopes his one-of-a-kind vessel, now being built on a San Francisco pier, will boost recycling of plastic bottles, which he says are a symbol of global waste. Except for the masts, which are metal, everything on the 60-foot catamaran is made from recycled plastic. "It's all sail power," he said. "The idea is to put no kind of pollution back into the atmosphere, or into our oceans for that matter, so everything on the boat will be composted. Everything will be recycled. Even the vessel is going to end up being recycled when we finish." De Rothschild's vessel, scheduled to set sail from San Francisco in April, is called the Plastiki. Its name is an homage of sorts to Thor Heyerdahl, the fabled Norwegian explorer who in 1947 sailed 4,300 miles across the Pacific on the Kon-Tiki, a raft made from balsa wood. De Rothschild is something of an adventurer himself. The scion of a wealthy British banking family, he is one of only several dozen people to traverse both the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps. In 2005 he founded Adventure Ecology, an organization that uses field expeditions to call attention to environmental issues.  Watch how the boat is constructed » . Joining him on the Plastiki will be a permanent crew of three sailors and scientists plus a handful of other crew members who will rotate through the voyage. The Plastiki is expected to stop in Hawaii, Tuvalu and Fiji on its way to Sydney, a trip estimated to take more than 100 days. The plastic sailboat is taking shape in an old pier building not far from this city's famous Fisherman's Wharf. Here, thousands of two-liter soda bottles are being stripped of their labels, washed, filled with dry-ice powder and then resealed. The dry ice sublimates into carbon dioxide gas and pressurizes the bottle, making it rigid. The vessel's twin hulls will be filled with 12,000 to 16,000 bottles. Skin-like panels made from recycled PET, a woven plastic fabric, will cover the hulls and a watertight cabin, which sleeps four. "This actually is the same material that is made out of bottles," said de Rothschild of the PET fabric. "We actually wrap the PET fabric over the PET foam and then basically put it under a vacuum, heat it, press it and create these long PET panels. So that means the boat is, technically, one giant bottle." Two wind turbines and an array of solar panels will charge a bank of 12-volt batteries, which will power several onboard laptop computers, a GPS and SAT phone. Only about 10 percent of the Plastiki will be made from new materials, de Rothschild said. He declined to reveal how much it's costing him to build the boat. "We could potentially put together a boat that costs a fraction of what normal conventional boats are made of," he said. "The idea is to take the Plastiki, break it down [after the voyage], and put it back into the system. So, it may come out being a jacket, a bag, more bottles. It's infinitely recyclable." The ultimate goal of the Plastiki voyage is not just to encourage people to embrace clean, renewable energy but also to see consumer waste as a potential resource. That's what this is all about -- showcasing cradle-to-cradle products rather than cradle-to-grave," de Rothschild said. Whether the Plastiki will successfully complete its unique journey remains to be seen. But to conservationists concerned about the amount of energy required to manufacture and distribute plastic bottles, its symbolic message is a welcome one. "Anything that gets in the news and makes people stop and think about plastic can be very helpful," said Betty McLaughlin, executive director of the Container Recycling Institute. "But it strikes me as a long way to go. I flew from Los Angeles to Australia once, and it took forever. This trip strikes me as kind of dangerous."

A: An adventurer is building a sailboat out of thousands of recycled plastic soda bottles .
He plans to sail it this spring from California to Australia, a journey of 11,000 miles .
Expedition leader is David de Rothschild, scion of a wealthy British banking family .
Boat, the Plastiki, will be a symbol of how consumer waste can be repurposed .
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Q: Clarksburg, West Virginia (CNN)  -- North Central West Virginia Airport boasts quick check-ins, free, accessible parking and a convenient baggage claim. That's not surprising, considering that fewer than 20 people fly out of the facility on any given day. And all three scheduled daily departures to Washington have a stop in Morgantown, West Virginia, only 35 miles away. But the airport offers a special treat as the end of the year approaches -- free sightseeing flights. Thanks to a Federal Aviation Administration program that gives small regional airports millions of dollars if they can reach a certain level of passenger traffic, the Clarksburg, West Virginia, facility tries its best to get 10,000 passengers off the ground by the end of the year. For Suzanne Pierson, that meant she and her grandson Donavan got an "awesome" bird's-eye view of Clarksburg and neighboring Bridgeport, West Virginia, from a chartered Boeing 757 last December. "They were trying to meet the quota, and they were 300 passengers short," said Pierson, who saw an ad placed by the airport advertising the free flights. Since the difference between 10,000 and 9,999 is the difference between $1 million and $150,000 in federal funds, airport managers in Clarksburg and other small towns do whatever they can to get over that number. In Kearney, Nebraska, residents get to take aerial tours of the city's Christmas lights for $15. In Altoona, Pennsylvania, residents got free 10-minute flights to reach the local airfield's goal of 10,000 passengers. Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican who is a frequent critic of federal spending, said "about 40" airports are believed to offer similar flight programs to reach the threshold, which was set by Congress. Coburn is asking the FAA and the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to come up with a definitive figure. "The whole purpose for that isn't to say what you're doing is illegal -- it's probably not -- but to have a more cogent policy that truly represents the needs based on enplanements for every airport," Coburn said. He said federal support for small airports like Clarksburg's "should be earned in terms of grant process," not by gaming the system. "We created the incentive to kind of weasel on it so you can get more money, and it's exacerbated now because of the economic downturn," Coburn said. Clarksburg is about 200 miles west of Washington and about 110 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where most area residents catch flights when they travel by air. But airport director Rick Rock said an economic benefit analysis said the facility contributes about $395 million into the local economy, "So I definitely think there's no question that we need this airport." In addition to the $1 million based on passenger traffic, the Clarksburg airport got $30 million to lengthen its runway in 1999 and another $1.6 million from the Obama administration's economic stimulus bill in 2009. Local students get free flights to Washington for school trips as well, Rock said. And the airport just got another $150,000 grant from the FAA to promote itself. Rock said the money is needed to meet FAA mandates for security, runway paving and safety, and he's proud of what the facility has achieved -- particularly for students. "We're trying to introduce aviation to them at a young age, so they can look at it as a career," he said. "A lot of these kids have never had the chance to fly. We've been able to share that opportunity, and the kids love it. It's special." But Coburn said at least five airports have used "creative ways" to keep the money flowing in and has managed to get support for a congressional investigation to find out how airports like North Central West Virginia can get so much money for so few passengers.

A: North Central West Virginia airport offers free sightseeing flights to boost numbers .
Other small airports offer free flights, Christmas light tours to increase passenger traffic .
Republican senator wants FAA and Government Accountability Office to investigate .
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Q: (CNN) -- As far as hitchhikers go, this one looks harmless enough. He or she -- it's hard to tell -- is short and friendly, if a little fashion-challenged. Get him talking, however, and he won't shut up. Meet hitchBOT, a talking, tweeting, bucket-bodied Canadian robot that's hitchhiking west from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Victoria, British Columbia -- a journey of nearly 4,000 miles. The robot employs artificial intelligence, speech recognition, social media and other tools to bum rides from motorists. Deposited last Monday on Highway 102 outside Halifax, hitchBot by Friday had journeyed to just west of Toronto. Its travels are being documented on Twitter, on Instagram and on the robot's website, which charts its progress on a map. The gender-neutral robot was conceived by university researchers David Harris Smith and Frauke Zeller, who view its quest as part performance art, part social experiment. As they see it, humans in popular science fiction are always wondering whether they can trust robots. Instead, they'd like to turn the question around: . Can robots trust human beings? So far, the answer appears to be yes. Three young men gave hitchBOT a ride, bought it a stuffed animal and fed it a "meal" of metal screws and motor oil. A couple covered hitchBOT with a plastic cape to keep it safe from the rain. And people have been recharging hitchBOT along the way by plugging it into their cars' cigarette lighters. "People seem to be rather intrigued with hitchBOT, and take very good care (of it)," said Smith, a communications and multimedia professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Zeller, a communications professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, in a statement e-mailed to CNN. "We have even seen hitchBOT lying in a camping bed under a blanket, and sitting on a toilet," they said, "so people certainly have fun with it." hitchBOT has a bucket for a torso, blue swimming-pool noodles for arms and legs and a smiling LED panel for a face, protected by a cake saver. It wears yellow gloves on its hands, and wellies -- rubber boots -- on its feet. Inside is a simple tablet PC and some components from Arduino, the open-source electronics platform. Together, all the parts cost about $1,000. "We wanted to see what we can build on a shoestring budget ... and with tools/components that one can get in any hardware store," Smith and Zeller said. Thanks to its computerized innards and speech software, hitchBOT can answer basic questions, make small talk and recite info from Wikipedia. It can also get pretty chatty, not always something you want in a road-trip companion. "We knew that sometimes ... hitchBOT won't be able to properly understand what people are saying. For these cases, we came up with the solution to let hitchBOT simply chatter away," its creators said. "We taught hitchBOT to say that sometimes it gets a bit carried away, and that its programmers could only write that many scripts, hoping for people to be patient." hitchBOT records its journey via GPS. It contains a camera and snaps random photos every half hour or so, which are moderated before being posted online to protect people's privacy. It also can record conversations with people it meets -- with their permission -- as a sort of audio diary. Humans who encounter hitchBOT are directed to its website, where instructions tell them how to handle the robot (tip: drop it off at rest stops or gas stations instead of alone on busy highways). hitchBOT's final destination is the Open Space artist center in Victoria, British Columbia, which means the robot will likely have to hitch a ride on a boat. Nobody knows exactly how long his cross-country trip will take. Smith and Zeller say the goal of their project is to examine the relationship between humans and "smart" technologies while seeing whether an anthropomorphic robot can engender good will, cooperation and even affection. The two researchers are worried that someone might mistreat hitchBOT. But the journey's success so far has allayed their fears a little. "We have seen so much support on social media and through other channels that we are now more optimistic," they said. "They (the robot's drivers) all say that wherever they go with hitchBOT, they meet lots of people through it. "Everybody stops, takes pictures, and wants to talk ... so this is an interesting case of technology bringing humans closer to each other."

A:
A talking robot is hitchhiking west from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Victoria, British Columbia .
Called hitchBOT, it uses artificial intelligence and speech software to communicate .
It relies on human drivers to ferry it from place to place .
As of Friday the robot had reached Toronto .
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