peterthegreat321 shares this story from Medium's new tech site, OneZero about Second Sight's experimental brain implant that offers a kind of artificial vision: From the outside, the Orion looks like a pair of sunglasses with a small camera and video processing unit attached to it. Implanted in the brain, however, is a postage stamp-sized chip containing 60 electrodes that sits on the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. When the device is switched on, the camera captures a person's surroundings, and the wireless video processing unit converts those images into electrical pulses using an algorithm. Those pulses are transmitted to the electrodes on the brain, which interprets them as visual clues... [T]he Orion, which shares much of its technology with the Argus II, bypasses the eye and optic nerve completely. "With the current system we're testing, you don't even need to have eyes for the device to work," says Dr. Nader Pouratian, the neurosurgeon at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center who implanted Jason Esterhuizen's device. As the primary investigator of the trial at UCLA, he has outfitted four patients with the device. The other two study participants received the implant from Dr. Daniel Yoshor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas...

Esterhuizen and the other participants have regained a limited amount of vision after being completely blind for years or decades. While they don't see color, shapes, or clear edges and can't yet read text, they are able to distinguish light from dark, they can recognize moving objects, and they have some degree of depth perception. People and objects appear as dots of light corresponding to where they're located, and as they get closer, more dots appear. "It's like learning a new language," Esterhuizen says. "You learn how to interpret what's going on...."

Electrodes in the brain also cause scar tissue to form over time, making them stop working, so it isn't clear how long these implants will last. Jessy Dorn, vice president of clinical and scientific affairs at Second Sight, says the electrodes used in the Orion device should work for at least five years. That means patients will probably eventually lose what little vision they acquire with the devices. Another major limitation of the Orion is that it's only useful for those who were born sighted and later lost their vision. In people who are born blind, the parts of the brain that are responsible for sight are not fully developed, and visual information cannot be effectively transmitted to the brain. A device that could help all people with blindness is still a long way off... Esterhuizen though is hopeful about the future of assistive technologies for the blind and visually impaired. "It's just baby steps for now," he says. "But eventually I think this technology will change the lives of millions of people."

Earlier this week Forbes reported on two Chilean astronomers "expecting to see images of distant stars and galaxies. Instead, they saw a train of SpaceX satellites crossing the night sky, a worrying sign of what might be to come for astronomy."

Now Digital Trends decries SpaceX's "proposed launch of tens of thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit where they will form a mega-constellation, making much of our present astronomical efforts impossible." Earlier this month, SpaceX launched another 60 of its Starlink satellites as part of its plan to provide high-speed internet to every part of the planet. However, as useful as this may sound, an astronomer who spoke to Digital Trends said that there are plenty of potential negative ramifications. "Even as professional astronomers, we've only just woken up to the fact that [this had the potential to be] a serious problem in the near future," said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

McDowell has long been an enthusiastic proponent of satellite launches. Since 1989, he has written and edited Jonathan's Space Report, a free internet newsletter which documents technical details of satellite launches. "I'm a little sad to be on the other side of the coin, but I think it's an important issue that needs to be talked about," he said.

McDowell's fear -- shared by others in his field -- is that the sheer number of satellite launches set to take place in the coming years will make it virtually impossible to carry out particular types of ground-based astronomy. Already astrophysicists carrying out long exposures, lasting around 15 seconds, frequently have their images ruined by a satellite trail passing overhead. Many times brighter than the "super faint galaxy" an astronomer might be looking for, this essentially ruins the image. "That's an annoyance, but you work around it," McDowell said. "You take multiple images , trusting that at least one of them will not have the trail. But when we get to the point where there are tens of thousands of very bright satellites in low orbit, the worry is that almost every image you take will have these trails on it... At some point certain types of astronomical observation will just not be feasible any more...."

With Starlink as currently envisaged, when it's fully deployed there will be more naked eye-visible satellites in the sky than there are stars," McDowell continued.... "The sky will be seething instead of static. That is a [major] change to our environment."

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Scientists have finally found traces of the axion, an elusive particle that rarely interacts with normal matter. The axion was first predicted over 40 years ago but has never been seen until now. Scientists have suggested that dark matter, the invisible matter that permeates our universe, may be made of axions. But rather than finding a dark matter axion deep in outer space, researchers have discovered mathematical signatures of an axion in an exotic material here on Earth. The newly discovered axion isn't quite a particle as we normally think of it: It acts as a wave of electrons in a supercooled material known as a semimetal. But the discovery could be the first step in addressing one of the major unsolved problems in particle physics.

The research team worked with a Weyl semimetal, a special and strange material in which electrons behave as if they have no mass, don't interact with each other and are split into two types: right-handed and left-handed. The property of being either right- or left-handed is called chirality; chirality in Weyl semimetals is conserved, meaning there are equal numbers of right- and left-handed electrons. Cooling the semimetal to 12 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 11 degrees Celsius) allowed the electrons to interact and to condense themselves into a crystal of their own. Waves of vibrations traveling through crystals are called phonons. Since the strange laws of quantum mechanics dictate that particles can also behave as waves, there are certain phonons that have the same properties as common quantum particles, such as electrons and photons. [Study co-author Johannes Gooth, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in GermanyGooth] and his colleagues observed phonons in the electron crystal that responded to electric and magnetic fields exactly like axions are predicted to. These quasiparticles also did not have equal numbers of right- and left-handed particles. (Physicists also predicted that axions would break conservation of chirality.) "It's encouraging that these equations [describing the axion] are so natural and compelling that they are realized in nature in at least one circumstance," said MIT theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, who originally named the axion in 1977. "If we know that there are some materials that host axions, well, maybe the material we call space also houses axions."

The research was published in the journal Nature.

In the search for life in our solar system, Mars tends to steal the spotlight. But in recent years Jupiter's fourth largest moon, Europa, has emerged as a promising extraterrestrial nursery. Planetary scientists have long suspected Europa may harbor a vast liquid water ocean beneath its thick, icy crust. If Europa's ocean also has a source of energy -- think hydrothermal vents -- and a few choice chemical elements, there's a decent chance it could support basic lifeforms. From a report: This theory makes a lot of assumptions, but on Monday it received one of its biggest boosts yet. An international team of astronomers announced they directly detected water vapor in Europa's atmosphere for the first time. As detailed in a paper published in Nature Astronomy, this method of detection is strong evidence that liquid water exists beneath the surface of Europa. "This doesn't necessarily mean the water vapor is coming from an ocean," says NASA planetary scientist Lucas Paganini. "But it does seem like this detection is connected to liquid water under the surface." A lot of what we know about Europa was gleaned from data collected by the Galileo spacecraft on its tour of Jupiter in the late '90s. One of the most remarkable findings from that mission was that something was messing with Jupiter's magnetic field. Based on this finding, planetary scientists hypothesized Europa might be home to an electrically conductive fluid, like salt water, that was causing the magnetic disturbances.

A third of plant species in tropical Africa are threatened with extinction, a new study suggests. Plants are crucial to many ecosystems and life in general, providing food and oxygen, as well as being the source of myriad materials and medicines. However, human activities including logging, mining and agriculture pose a major threat. From a report: While the extinction risk of animals around the world has been well studied, the risk facing many plants remains unclear: 86% of mammal species have been assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for its Red List, compared with only 8% of plant species. Now experts say they have come up with a rapid approach to give a preliminary classification. "Our approach can help to prioritise either species or regions on which proper IUCN Red Listing should focus," said Dr Gilles Dauby of the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development and a co-author of the research.

He said the list was recognised as an authoritative source, and was crucial to planning projects that could affect the environment. The new study is the latest to throw the plight of plants into the spotlight. Earlier this year, scientists completed the most thorough analysis to date of plant extinctions, finding that 571 species had been wiped out since the start of the industrial revolution -- a figure they say is likely to be an underestimate. Writing in the journal Science Advances, Dauby and colleagues report how they focused on two IUCN Red List criteria -- one relating to population size reduction and the other to habitat decline -- to develop a computer algorithm to automatically classify the conservation status of plants.

Oxford Dictionaries has declared "climate emergency" the word of the year for 2019, following a hundred-fold increase in usage that it says demonstrated a "greater immediacy" in the way we talk about the climate. From a report: Defined as "a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it," Oxford said the words soared from "relative obscurity" to "one of the most prominent -- and prominently debated -- terms of 2019." According to the dictionary's data, usage of "climate emergency" soared 10,796%. Oxford said the choice was reflective, not just of the rise in climate awareness, but the focus specifically on the language we use to discuss it. The rise of "climate emergency" reflected a conscious push towards language of immediacy and urgency, the dictionary said. In 2019, "climate" became the most common word associated with "emergency," three times more than "health emergency" in second.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: In just over 1 decade, a small capsule shaped like a flying saucer could blaze in from space and smash into an empty Utah desert. Its payload would be momentous: less than 1 kilogram of rocks gathered on Mars. After years as a dream, Mars sample return is now a $7 billion plan, devised jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). It is a complicated plan, involving three heavy rocket launches from Earth, two rovers, the first ever rocket launch from another planet, and a daring space rendezvous between a sample container and a spacecraft that would ferry it back to Earth. The first element, NASA's Mars 2020 rover, is nearly built and ready for launch next summer. And now, NASA and the Europeans are close to finalizing the plans to bring the samples collected by Mars 2020 home, with ESA likely to commit funding to the work at a meeting later this month.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Unlike other carbon-footprint calculators already on the market, the application developed by Enfuce Financial Services Oy, a Finnish payment services provider, does not rely on users inputting the data manually. Instead, it combines data from credit cards and banks with purchase data from retailers to provide real-time calculations of how a given product affects the climate. With an estimated 70% of carbon emissions globally attributed to end users, Enfuce chairman and co-founder Monika Liikamaa says the app will help people adapt their lifestyles and make them compatible with the goal of keeping global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius.

After the initial set up and opt-in, the app will calculate a carbon footprint based on the user's purchases -- to the level of individual steaks or tomatoes. It will then propose actions to reduce their carbon impact. Typical suggestions may include taking a shorter shower, hopping on the bus instead of the car, turning down the thermostat and going vegan for a week. The app is a side project for Enfuce, which already handles sensitive payments data securely. Its core business is to run credit card systems for clients that do not require owning expensive computer servers. Enfuce is in talks with three major banks and is already working with Mastercard Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.'s cloud-server unit. No vendor will have exclusive rights to the system, which should be available by March, the company said.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A new forensic technique could have criminals -- and some prosecutors -- tearing their hair out: Researchers have developed a method they say can identify a person from as little as 1 centimeter of a single strand of hair -- and that is eight times more sensitive than similar protein analysis techniques. If the new method ever makes it into the courtroom, it could greatly expand the ability to identify the people at the scene of a crime. To get reliable data from hair, forensic scientists previously needed DNA from skin still attached to hair follicles. But recent technologies have instead analyzed proteins in the hair itself, like keratin. Because the sequences of amino acids in proteins vary slightly from person to person based on their genetic code, this information can be used to identify people with a high degree of accuracy without DNA.

The catch? Most methods require several steps of grinding and heating the hair, which destroys much of the protein. And scientists might not always detect enough variation in the remaining proteins to make a confident identification. To get more proteins for analysis, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) did away with the grinding and developed a method with only one step: heating the hair in detergent solution. When the researchers used mass spectrometry analysis to find out what they had extracted from the dissolved hair, they found they recovered more proteins -- and their subunits, peptides -- than with other extraction techniques. They also identified a dozen new protein building blocks called genetically variant peptides (GVPs) that differ among individuals. These new GVPs join thousands of others in NIST's library of peptide sequences. GPVs aren't yet used to identify people in criminal cases -- but could be in the future. There are still some drawbacks with this new method. "To get enough material to build a profile, scientists need 1 day or more, as well as extensive experience with sophisticated protein analysis techniques," the report says.

"In addition, no identification method based on genetically variant peptides in hair proteins has been used in court. There are still a lot of questions to be answered before that's a reality."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Caltech scientists have discovered that a population of embryonic stem cells called neural crest cells may help explain how vertebrates progressively evolved a more and more efficient head. Neural crest cells originate within the developing central nervous system before migrating throughout the embryo. They are a major player in the development of the jaws and other important components of the head and face, making them a good candidate for a role in vertebrate head evolution.

The study, led by postdoctoral scholar Megan Martik, began by comparing the genetic makeup of lamprey neural crest with that of chicken embryos. The team discovered that the lamprey neural crest cells lacked important genes that are present in the head neural crest of birds and mammals, and critical for making advanced structures like the jaw. The team wondered how the neural crest ultimately acquired the genes. To look for clues, they examined the neural crest genes of animals that have jaws, such as sharks and zebrafish, and evolved after lamprey but well before chickens and other birds. Martik and her colleagues found that the genetic program that helped to make the head more sophisticated was created by the progressive addition of genes to the neural crest repertoire as the vertebrate tree of life advanced and new species evolved. The study has been published in the journal Nature.

For the first time, astrophysicists have observed a cosmic explosion emit particles that are a trillion times more energetic than visible light, a record-setting measurement from a phenomenon that scientists are still seeking to fully understand. Motherboard reports: The observation of this powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB), as these explosions are known, adds another layer to what scientists think happens when a star implodes. The findings were published on November 20 in two papers in the journal Nature. [...] After the GRB was detected, telescopes on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands quickly adjusted to observe it. The telescopes are overseen by the MAGIC collaboration, weigh 64 tons each, and were designed to measure extremely high-energy emissions from gamma-ray bursts. They automatically process alerts from satellites and adjust to face the bursts in less than a minute. A fast response time is crucial: Gamma-ray bursts can last from a fraction of a second to mere minutes. Elena Moretti was one of the scientists working the night of the GRB's detection, and a co-author of the two studies.

The burst came from a progenitor star that was 4.5 billion light-years away, according to the studies -- relatively close, astronomically speaking. The farther away high-energy particles are from Earth, the more likely they are to be absorbed by extragalactic background light and not reach our telescopes. After verifying that the GRB observed emitted photons in the TeV range, scientists realized the process used to explain and model these bursts could not account for such a high energy. Instead, Moretti said they are nearly certain that the emitted photons were raised to a TeV-level energy after colliding with nearby electrons.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: People under the influence of a psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca frequently experience vivid visual and aural hallucinations and also report feeling as if they are in a dream. Now a new study published in Scientific Reports has shown that the drug alters the user's waking brain-wave patterns to produce a mental state that the researchers describe as "dreaming while awake." Ayahuasca is a bitter tea made from the Brazilian vine banisteriopsis caapi, colloquially known as the "spirit vine," used in shaman-led spiritual ceremonies among native people in the Amazon basin. Its primary active ingredient is dimethyltryptamine (DMT). That's the secret to ayahuasca's powerful psychedelic effects, which can also produce feelings of elation and fear or a sense of epiphany or psychological breakthrough. Those mind-altering properties come at a price, however. Participants in the ceremonies are often advised to bring a bucket, since nausea and vomiting (and sometimes diarrhea) are common reactions to the tea.

The current paper is the most recent study out of the [Imperial College London's Center for Psychedelic Research]. The study involved 13 subjects fitted with EEG caps and electrodes to monitor their brain activity while being given an IV infusion of DMT. The team found that the DMT caused a marked drop in alpha waves, a mark of wakefulness, along with a corresponding brief increase in theta brain waves, indicative of a dream state. Furthermore, while brain activity has been shown to decrease in subjects under the influence of psilocybin and LSD, the Imperial College researchers found more chaotic brain activity in subjects while under the influence of DMT. That might be why ayahuasca users report more vivid visual effects and a greater sense of immersion than is typically experienced with other psychedelics.

A test version of SpaceX's next-generation rocket, Starship, partially burst apart during ground tests in Texas today, erupting plumes of gas and sending some pieces of hardware soaring into the sky. The Verge reports: The explosive result occurred while SpaceX was seemingly conducting some pressure tests with the vehicle at the company's test site in Boca Chica, Texas. The local live streams showed the vehicle venting gas periodically throughout the day, indicating that testing was underway. This prototype was meant to test the design of Starship -- a monster spacecraft the company is working on to transport cargo and people to deep space destinations like the Moon and Mars. In fact, this same vehicle is the one that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk showed off to reporters in September. At the time, he claimed the test vehicle could be doing flights to low altitudes within the next couple of months and that some version of Starship could reach Earth orbit within six months.

Now, that timeline is almost certain to shift. After the explosion, Musk indicated on Twitter that SpaceX may no longer fly this particular prototype and will instead conduct flight tests with a newer, more up-to-date model that the company planned to build. "This had some value as a manufacturing pathfinder, but flight design is quite different," Musk wrote, referring to the prototype that burst.

Doctors have placed humans in suspended animation for the first time, as part of a trial in the US that aims to make it possible to fix traumatic injuries that would otherwise cause death. From a report: Samuel Tisherman, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told New Scientist that his team of medics had placed at least one patient in suspended animation, calling it "a little surreal" when they first did it. He wouldn't reveal how many people had survived as a result. The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma -- such as a gunshot or stab wound -- and have had a cardiac arrest. Their heart will have stopped beating and they will have lost more than half their blood. There are only minutes to operate, with a less than 5 per cent chance that they would normally survive. EPR involves rapidly cooling a person to around 10 to 15C by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline. The patient's brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body -- which would otherwise be classified as dead -- is moved to the operating theatre. A surgical team then has 2 hours to fix the person's injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted. Tisherman says he hopes to be able to announce the full results of the trial by the end of 2020.

dryriver writes: In an episode of the BBC's Tomorrow's World broadcasted all the way back in 1984, a presenter shows hands-on how a laser hologram of a real-world object can be recorded onto a transparent plastic medium, erased again by heating the plastic with an electric current, and then re-recorded differently. The presenter states that computer scientists are very interested in holograms because the future of digital data storage may lie in them. This was 35 years ago. Holographic data storage for PCs, smartphones, etc. still is not available commercially. Why is this? Are data storage holograms too difficult to create? Or did nobody do enough research on the subject, getting us all stuck with mechanical hard disks and SSDs instead? Where are the hologram drives that appeared "so promising" three decades ago?

An anonymous reader shares a report: "I don't want to be a flat Earther," David Weiss says, his voice weary as he reflects on his personal awakening. "Would you wake up in the morning and want everyone to think you're an idiot?" But Weiss is a flat Earther. Ever since he tried and failed to find proof of the Earth's curve four years ago, he's believed with an evident passion that our planet is both flat and stationary -- and it's turned his world upside down. [...] People in every pocket of this spherical planet are rejecting science and spreading the word that the Earth is flat. There's no clear study indicating how many people have been convinced -- and flat Earthers like Weiss will tell you without evidence there are millions more in the closet anyway, including Hollywood A-listers and commercial airline pilots -- but online communities have hundreds of thousands of followers and YouTube is inundated with flat-Earth content creators, whose productions reach millions.

A YouGov survey of more than 8,000 American adults suggested last year that as many as one in six Americans are not entirely certain the world is round, while a 2019 Datafolha Institute survey of more than 2,000 Brazilian adults indicated that 7% of people in that country reject that concept, according to local media. The flat-Earth community has its own celebrities, music, merchandise -- and a weighty catalog of pseudo-scientific theories. It's been the subject of a Netflix documentary and has been endorsed by figures including the rapper B.o.B. Each year, more flat-Earth events fill the calendar, organizers say.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via the BBC: According to a 2015 survey of the most annoying office noises by Avanta Serviced Office Group, conversations were rated the most vexing, closely followed by coughing, sneezing and sniffing, loud phone voices, ringing phones and whistling. Why do we find it so hard to be around these everyday noises? What is it about them that allows them to lodge in our brains and make it impossible to think? [...] Back in 2011, researchers from University College London and the University of London decided to find out. First of all, the researchers asked 118 female secondary school students to complete a questionnaire, which revealed how extroverted or introverted each was -- essentially, whether they thrive on socializing and being immersed in the outside world or if they find these experiences exhausting. Next the students were subjected to a battery of cognitive challenges -- and to add extra difficulty, they were asked to complete them while listening to British garage music, or the clamor of a classroom. A control group completed them in silence.

As the researchers suspected, all the students performed better in silence. But they also found that, in general -- with the exception of one test -- the more extroverted they were, the less they were affected by noise. A person's level of extroversion is thought to be a key aspect of their personality -- one of the so-called 'Big Five' factors that determines who we are, along with things like how open we are to new experiences. According to one prominent theory, extroverts are inherently "understimulated," so they tend to seek out situations which increase their level of arousal -- like noisy environments. Meanwhile, introverts have the opposite problem; as the famous poet, novelist and introvert Charles Bukowski put it: "People empty me. I have to get away to refill." With this in mind, it makes sense that more introverted workers would be more affected by the background noise, since anything that increases their level of arousal, like music or the chatter of colleagues, could be overwhelming.

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have devised a system that can predict what different cars will do by determining how selfish or selfless a driver is. From a report: Specifically, they used something called social value orientation (SVO), which represents the degree to which someone is selfish ("egoistic") versus altruistic or cooperative ("prosocial"). The system then estimates drivers' SVOs to create real-time driving trajectories for self-driving cars. Testing their algorithm on the tasks of merging lanes and making unprotected left turns, the team showed that they could better predict the behavior of other cars by a factor of 25 percent. For example, in the left-turn simulations their car knew to wait when the approaching car had a more egoistic driver, and to then make the turn when the other car was more prosocial.

To try to expand the car's social awareness, the CSAIL team combined methods from social psychology with game theory, a theoretical framework for conceiving social situations among competing players. The team modeled road scenarios where each driver tried to maximize their own utility and analyzed their "best responses" given the decisions of all other agents. Based on that small snippet of motion from other cars, the team's algorithm could then predict the surrounding cars' behavior as cooperative, altruistic, or egoistic -- grouping the first two as "prosocial." People's scores for these qualities rest on a continuum with respect to how much a person demonstrates care for themselves versus care for others. Here are some potential use cases of such a system: "Say you're a human driving along and a car suddenly enters your blind spot -- the system could give you a warning in the rear-view mirror that the car has an aggressive driver, allowing you to adjust accordingly. It could also allow self-driving cars to actually learn to exhibit more human-like behavior that will be easier for human drivers to understand."

The team is planning to apply their system to pedestrians, bicycles, and other agents in driving environments. "In addition, they will be investigating other robotic systems acting among humans, such as household robots, and integrating SVO into their prediction and decision-making algorithms," the report says.

Last year, China set a goal of 35 orbital launches and ended up with 39 launch attempts. "This year, China is set to pace the world again," reports Ars Technica. "Through Sunday, the country has launched 27 orbital missions, followed by Russia (19), and the United States (16). Although nearly a month and a half remain in this year, a maximum of six additional orbital launches are likely from the United States in 2019." From the report: To be fair, China's space launch program has not been without hiccups. The country's space program is still trying to bring its large Long March 5 vehicle back into service after a catastrophic failure during just its second mission, in July 2017. And the country had three failures in 2018 and 2019, compared to just one in the United States and Russia combined.

The United States has taken a step back this year in part due to decreased activity by SpaceX. The company launched a record 21 missions last year but has so far launched 11 rockets in 2019. A flurry of missions remains possible in the next six weeks for the company, including a space station resupply mission in early December, a commercial satellite launch, and additional Starlink flights. Another big factor has been a slow year for United Launch Alliance. The Colorado-based company has launched just two Delta IV-Medium rockets this year, one Delta IV-Heavy, and a single Atlas V mission. The company may launch Boeing's Starliner spacecraft before the end of 2019, giving the Atlas V rocket a second launch. It is possible that Rocket Lab, which has flown its Electron rocket from New Zealand five times in 2019 and is planning at least one more mission before the end of the year, will have more launches than United Launch Alliance for the first time. Sometime next year, Rocket Lab should also begin to add to the US tally for orbital launches as it opens a new facility at Wallops Island, Virginia.

AmiMoJo writes: A woman is suing a London NHS trust for not revealing her father had been diagnosed with Huntington's disease before she had her own child. She only discovered he carried the gene for the degenerative, incurable brain disorder after her daughter was born. The woman then found out she too carried the faulty gene, meaning her daughter has a 50% chance of having it.

The story is tragic. In 2007 her father murdered her mother and was found to have Huntington's, which often results in confusion and violent behavior. She was already pregnant at the time and her father asked that she not be told as he feared she would abort the pregnancy. Doctors were in a bind, with doctor-patient confidentiality on one hand and a duty of care on the other. The woman is arguing that in cases of serious inherited diseases children should have a right to know. She says if she had known she would not have had a child, who has a 50:50 chance of also having Huntington's and will one day have to look after her confused and possibly violent mother.