Month: June 2019

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  Track of the 16-day Stratollite mission from mid-May to early June. [credit: World View ]

When we last heard from World View, the company was performing something of an advertising stunt by launching a KFC chicken sandwich into the stratosphere with its balloon technology. Now the Arizona-based company has taken a significant step toward developing its remote sensing system for practical applications.

Prior to last month, the Stratollite system had never flown for longer than five days at a stretch. But from mid-May to early June, it completed a 16-day mission that demonstrated several key abilities. For more than eight days, the company said, the balloon maintained its position over a circular area on the ground about 120km wide. It also held station over a circle with a diameter of just 9.5km for 6.5 hours.

Flying in the stratosphere at altitudes between 15 and 23km, a Stratollite uses a primary lift balloon to reach its peak altitude, and then uses secondary balloons to rapidly rise and fall through the stratosphere. By essentially riding the winds, the vehicle attempts to maintain a relatively stable position over the Earth.

Enlarge (credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Tesla customers who purchased the "Full Self-Driving" package prior to March 1 will soon get access to a new perk, the company told Ars Technica on Tuesday: priority access to new software releases. The move is an effort fulfill a commitment the company made in a March 1 blog post, though what Tesla is actually delivering isn't quite what Tesla promised.

The March post, titled "Upgrading to Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability," offered the owners of existing Tesla vehicles an opportunity to activate Tesla's driver-assistance packages at lower prices than Tesla had been charging previously.

This angered some existing customers—especially those who had prepaid for the "Full Self-Driving" package. People had paid thousands of dollars for this option in 2016, 2017, 2018, or early 2019. But by March 2019, they hadn't gotten anything for their money because the technology wasn't ready yet. Many were miffed that Tesla was now offering other customers a better deal on the same package, and they felt that Tesla should offer partial refunds to customers who paid the old, higher price.

Enlarge / Chinese geneticist He Jiankui speaks during the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the University of Hong Kong days after he claimed to have altered the genes of the embryo of a pair of twin girls before birth, prompting outcry from scientists of the field. (credit: S.C. Leung/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Late last year, a Chinese researcher shocked the scientific community when he announced that the first gene-edited humans had already been born. He Jiankui barreled past an emerging consensus that the technology wasn't ready for use and, once it was, should be reserved for otherwise untreatable diseases. Instead of respecting those boundaries, He did much of his work without any clear institutional oversight.

Rather than target an incurable genetic disorder, He Jiankui focused on something for which we have both preventative measures and treatments: HIV infection. He did so by using CRISPR gene editing to damage a gene that encodes a protein that HIV uses to enter human cells; previous studies have shown that mutations in this gene protect against HIV infection. But the same mutation was already known to make humans more susceptible to other diseases, raising the question of whether the gene editing put its recipients at risk.

That question has now been answered with an emphatic "yes." Researchers have found that adults carrying mutations in the gene see their general mortality rise by 20 percent compared to their peers.