Science news this week: A breakthrough cure for Huntington’s disease and a fast-growing black hole that breaks physics

This week’s science news has been dominated by medical marvels, with the announcement of a breakthrough gene therapy that has treated Huntington’s disease for the first time.

Huntington’s disease is relatively rare, affecting 1 in 10,000 to 20,000 people in the U.S., but it’s a cruel and terrible disease. Caused by a single defective gene, the disease runs through families and appears between the ages of 30 and 50 with dementia-like symptoms that include loss of cognition and motor control. Until now, no treatments have slowed the disease’s progression, and patients typically die within 10 to 25 years of it manifesting.

The new therapy introduced a new gene into cells in the two parts of the brain hit hardest by the disease to slow its progression by 75%, marking a remarkable first in the field. And while the treatment remains in clinical trials, the researchers have begun the application process to get it approved in the U.S. and then Europe.

Another remarkable medical procedure also featured heavily in our coverage this week: a Vancouver man whose vision was restored by Canada’s first ever tooth-in-eye surgery. Brent Chapman lost his left eye after a severe allergic reaction to the painkiller ibuprofen. Following two decades of failed attempts to fix it, doctors resorted to the rare procedure of implanting his tooth into his cornea, where it served as a platform for a plastic lens that brought back his sight.

Elsewhere, we reported on the intriguing and troubling links between daylight saving time and strokes in a study which argues for abandoning biannual clock switching altogether.

Super Typhoon Ragasa became the strongest storm of the year

A brief lull in hurricane activity during the season’s apparent peak last week left some experts asking where all the tropical storms had gone. But they weren’t left wondering for long, as Super Typhoon Ragasa — the strongest storm of the year so far with wind speeds topping 177 mph (285 km/h) — rampaged across the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and Vietnam, causing mass evacuations and shutdowns of the region’s megacities.

It’s also far from the last, with another storm, named Buloi, developing into a typhoon and on its way to the Philippines. Meanwhile in the Atlantic, three storm systems are developing into next week, drawing extra strength from warming ocean waters.

Discover more planet Earth news

—Weird glass in Australia appears to be from giant asteroid impact — but scientists ‘yet to locate the crater’

—Scientists discover 85 ‘active’ lakes buried beneath Antarctica’s ice

—We are just beginning to discover what Earth’s inner core is really made of

Life’s Little Mysteries

Indiana Jones, Lara Croft or Nathan Drake — picture any of these characters and you’ll likely arrive at an image of them fleeing from booby-trapped tombs with a priceless treasure in hand. But where did we arrive at this idea? And were Egypt’s tombs really rigged to kill thieves and archaeologists alike? We dug up the answer.

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Monster black hole breaks cosmology

Black holes are famous for breaking all the rules, most notoriously creating crazy singularities in Einstein’s general relativity, which describes how gravity works. Yet beyond their physics-warping event horizons, the cosmic monsters are usually neatly constrained by theory — obeying a strict “Eddington limit” for how fast they can grow based on their outward radiation pressure and gravitational pull.

That’s why the discovery of a giant black hole growing at 2.4 times this limit caught astrophysicists off guard. It’s not the first super black hole to blow past this limit (others have been spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope), but it does provide clear evidence that our current cosmological models are missing something big in their description of these massive eaters, and it could have universe-altering consequences.

Discover more space and physics news

—‘We thought it was a problem with the instrument’: Scientists shocked by rare ‘Einstein cross’ with a surprise in the center

—The James Webb telescope may have discovered a brand new class of cosmic object: the black hole star

—We could nuke ‘city killer’ asteroid 2024 YR4 before it hits the moon — if we act fast, new study warns

Also in science news this week

—5,000-year-old stone tomb discovered in Spain is 43 feet long — and it holds many prehistoric burials

—‘Completely unexplained’: James Webb telescope finds strange ‘dark beads’ in Saturn’s atmosphere

—Scientific breakthrough leads to ‘fluorescent biological qubit’ — it could mean turning your cells into quantum sensors

—Gigantic dinosaur with ‘claws like hedge trimmers’ found with croc leg still in its jaws in Argentina

Science Long read

Hundreds of millions of people suffer from psoriasis. Yet the condition, an autoimmune response which causes itchy scales to appear on the scalp and skin, is not fully understood.

While scientists know that some genes make people more susceptible to psoriasis, the condition is also triggered by air pollution, emerging research is revealing. With 99% of people around the world exposed to air beneath the World Health Organization’s guidelines, Live Science reported from Maharashtra, India, on the role low quality air plays to exacerbate autoimmune conditions.

Something for the weekend

If you’re looking for something a little longer to read over the weekend, here are some of the best interviews, polls and science histories published this week.

—In ‘Secrets of the Brain,’ Jim Al-Khalili explores 600 million years of brain evolution to understand what makes us human [Interview]

—Live Science crossword puzzle #11: Giant cloud at the edge of the solar system — 7 across [Crossword]

—Dangers of falling birth rates in the US have been ‘dramatically overstated,’ experts say [Op-ed]

Science in motion

This photograph that took fifth place in this year’s Nikon Small World in Motion competition came entirely by accident after a zoologist in Brazil investigated a piece of red algae that had washed ashore. Studying the aquatic plant underneath a microscope, Alvaro Migotto spotted a baby sea urchin crawling across its surface using tiny tubed feet.

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