Weekly Science Update: Breakthrough Cure for Huntington's Disease and Rapidly Expanding Black Hole Challenges Physics Principles

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.

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.

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

really rigged to kill thieves and archaeologists alike? We dug up the answer.

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An illustration of a supermassive black hole blasting out a jet of energy in the early universe — A black hole growing beyond theoretical limits could become a head-scratcher for cosmologists. (Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss)

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.

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.