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The Orionid meteor shower – named because they appear to come from the constellation Orion – will peak this Wednesday.
The annual meteor shower is caused by the Earth passing through dust and debris left by Halley’s Comet, which is visible to the naked eye from every 75 or 76 years.

The meteor shower is visible in both the northern and southern hemispheres during the hours after midnight. Halley’s Comet last appeared within the inner solar system in 1986, and is expected to return in 2061.

Image: A glimpse of an Orionid meteor captured by NASA in 2015
According to NASA, the Orionids “are considered to be one of the most beautiful showers of the year” and the meteors are known for their brightness and speed.
Potentially up to 25 shooting stars can be seen every hour at their peak on Wednesday, around midnight, although the shower itself will continue through to November.

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The meteors are travelling very fast, at about 148,000 mph (66 km/s), when the enter Earth’s atmosphere, meaning they sometimes leave glowing “trains” behind them.

These trains are formed of incandescent bits of debris which can sometimes glow for several seconds, and potentially even minutes if conditions are right.

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To spot the shooting stars, astronomers recommend wrapping up warm and finding a dark spot, away from light pollution, and be prepared to wait.
If you can avoid falling asleep, NASA recommends lying on your back with your feet pointing to the south east, and keep your naked eyes open and capturing as much of the sky as possible.
The largest of the fast meteors can also sometimes become fireballs, and NASA advises amateur astronomers to look for prolonged explosions of light when viewing the Orionids.

The question of why UK arrivals aren’t tested for coronavirus has been asked repeatedly in recent months, by airlines, unions, MPs and passengers themselves. 
Despite being standard practice in many parts of the world, the government maintains that airport testing isn’t a suitable alternative to a 14-day isolation period for travellers from risky countries because it doesn’t pick up people who get ill after they’ve arrived.

And, in support of this argument, the prime minister, transport secretary and health secretary have all insisted that testing at points of entry will only identify 7% of coronavirus infections.
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Image: Government ministers have said testing at points of entry would only identify 7% of infections
Is that accurate? Well, it depends who you ask – and, more crucially, how you frame the question.

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The 7% figure comes from a piece of modelling commissioned by Public Health England early in the crisis.

Like a lot of modelling, it doesn’t rely on real world data. Instead, it simplifies the problem by making a set of assumptions, then calculating what would happen in those conditions.

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Within the limits set by those assumptions, the 7% number is correct but the trouble is that the assumptions themselves are questionable – or as one senior epidemiologist put it, “weird”.
There are five assumptions, let’s take them in turn.
Assumption 1: No one flying to the UK is ill with COVID-19
Yes, you read that correctly. In this model, no one gets on a plane with full-blown coronavirus – that is, coronavirus that has developed past the incubation period.
No one with a cough or a temperature, even a very mild one, flies to the UK. Nor does anyone who is asymptomatic.
Why not? Because in the world of the model, anyone with coronavirus that can be detected by a test is presumed to be too ill to fly or is stopped from getting on the flight by screening systems in foreign countries.
As you might imagine, this has a significant impact on the paper’s conclusions.
Just over 60% of infected passengers are counted as “non-fliers” who’ll never reach the UK border.
Of the rest, most are assumed to go undetected, leaving only 7% to be picked up by UK airport testing.

Image: One model assumes no one flying to the UK has coronavirus
Reintroduce these non-fliers – either because you believe selfishness will propel sick people onto planes or because you don’t think foreign screening systems are infallible – and you get a very different result.
“Assuming that filtering is not great in the country of origin (which is an assumption that I think we should indeed make), using a single test when landing in the UK would be a very efficient policy,” one researcher told Sky News.
Reverse the model’s assumptions and airport testing could, she said, capture “more than 60% of infected individuals”. Even if you’re more conservative, you still get a big jump.
Dr Luca Ferretti, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford advising the Italian government on its coronavirus strategy, did some calculations to work out what would happen if just half of the model’s asymptomatic passengers got on the plane.
With this change, he said, you would catch one in three infected travellers. That’s a big increase on 7% – and there are other assumptions still to unpick.
Assumption 2: Tests don’t pick up people who are pre-symptomatic
Rather than imagining a plane packed with sick people, this model pictures one full of people who are in the incubation phase after catching COVID-19.
It assumed most of these infections won’t be picked up by tests when landing in the UK as the viral load would be too low for detection.
The only people the model thinks will be caught by airport testing are those who come out of the five-day incubation period during the flight, and therefore become detectable while they are in the air.

Image: This assumption can be challenged by evidence that shows tests can pick up the virus in the incubation phase
They make up the 7%, which is based on medium-haul flights. For long-haul it comes in at 12% and for short-haul 3%, although for some reason politicians didn’t use these figures – perhaps 7% just felt right.
Once again, this assumption can be challenged.
Six months into the pandemic, evidence suggested PCR tests pick up people still in the incubation phase.
Even assuming no one on the plane comes out of incubation on the flight, it could still identify a fair proportion – with the extra benefit of catching them at their most infectious.
Dr Ferretti said that if incubating infections were detectable up to two days in advance, then even with 50% sensitivity, you would still pick up more than double the figure in the model.
Adding that to his earlier figure for asymptomatic passengers, and adjusting for some imperfections in testing, Dr Ferretti estimated that 40% of infectious travellers would be picked by airport testing.
“My intuition would be that unless you have a contact tracing system sucking all testing capacity, I would put some testing capacity on airports,” he said.
Assumption 3: Travellers are the same as everyone else
Coronavirus is a disease spread by a few chance events.
According to one recent study in India 70% of people with the virus gave it to no one, while 85% of infections came from just 5% of original cases.
When it comes to COVID-19 suppression, stopping superspreader events is absolutely key.
It’s not just possible, but likely, that travellers have more contacts than normal while they are away, making it more important to catch them as they come into the country. But this model doesn’t look at that.

Image: Other countries, including France, offer coronavirus tests at airports
Assumption 4: All countries are the same
Every country is assumed to have an equal prevalence of coronavirus, so there’s no way of knowing if testing would be more effective for some countries – because of the quality of their screening system, for instance.
The government has its travel corridors list, but even if visitors from some countries are asked to quarantine when they arrive in the UK, airport testing could still be useful, because it could help shorten the quarantine time.
The paper suggests that if passengers were tested once at the airport then once again eight days later, with a subsequent two days of isolation, the system would catch 96% of cases.
Such a system wouldn’t be easy to operate, but it might be possible in certain cases.
Assumption 5: Models can tell us what’s going to happen
Throughout the pandemic, the government has relied on models as a guide for decision-making.
But models are only as good as their assumptions, which, invariably, are far too simple to reflect the complexity of the real world.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use models, but it does mean we should treat them with caution.
There is now a body of evidence based on the experiences of different countries with airport testing. Why doesn’t the government use that instead? (It established a task force last week to create a new testing regime for international travel, so this may be happening as we speak.)
Talking about the use of models, Dr Ferretti said: “This has been a bit of a constant and not just in the UK.
“There’s a habit, especially for politicians, to cherry-pick numbers because they need to justify decisions.
“Sometimes even if the decision could make sense or could be informed by some information they give a number just as a statistic to silence opposition.”

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A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “This scientific evidence was reviewed and approved by SAGE, as well as modelling groups such as The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who have independently generated similar results.
“International arrivals from non-exempt countries must quarantine for the full 14 days as the incubation period for the virus means passengers who do not follow this advice may pose a risk to others.
“Work is ongoing with clinicians, the devolved administrations and the travel industry to consider if and how testing could be used to reduce the self-isolation period.”

Microsoft has released a new version of its Xbox app for the iPhone and iPad which will allow Xbox gamers to play their consoles remotely.
Unlike the xCloud games streaming service – which only works on Android devices – the Xbox app allows phone users to stream games which are playing on their own console.

Microsoft’s xCloud, which lets gamers stream games from Microsoft’s servers, has been prohibited from the App Store as Apple says the service does not follow its normal review guidelines.

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The Xbox app is similar to the PS4 Remote Play app developed by Sony, enabling PlayStation users to stream their games to an Apple device over WiFi.
However the Xbox app doesn’t depend on both devices being on the same WiFi network, allowing users to stream their games even when they’re not at home – as long as the device is on and both have a decent connection.

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Apple currently does not allow users to use their devices to play games using cloud computing – having the games run on hardware the phones are connecting to remotely – which would give gamers the ability to play higher-quality games on their mobile devices.

Microsoft has criticised Apple for not allowing its users access to the xCloud games streaming platform, as well as Google’s cloud gaming service Stadia.

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Microsoft said Apple “stands alone as the only general purpose platform to deny consumers from cloud gaming and game subscription services like Xbox Game Pass”.
“[Apple] consistently treats gaming apps differently, applying more lenient rules to non-gaming apps even when they include interactive content,” Microsoft added.
It comes ahead of Microsoft releasing two new Xbox consoles in November, and Apple releasing four 5G-compatible iPhone 12 models.

Image: Microsoft is releasing new Xbox models in November
Apple suggested that Microsoft and Google could comply with its rules to have xCloud and Stadia available in the App Store by submitting the games as separate apps.
Microsoft dismissed the offer however, telling The Verge: “This remains a bad experience for customers.
“Gamers want to jump directly into a game from their curated catalogue within one app, just like they do with movies or songs, and not be forced to download over 100 apps to play individual games from the cloud.”

The Falklands War would have been lost without the contribution of GCHQ, according to an authorised “warts and all” history of the spy agency.
It is one of many revelations in newly released Behind The Enigma, by Professor John Ferris.

The author says its contribution to the 1982 war with Argentina has been underestimated.
Prof Ferris says GCHQ helped guide British strategy and diplomacy ahead of and during the war, and demonstrated how the Argentine navy was attempting to ambush British forces, which led to the sinking of the General Belgrano.
Without GCHQ, he concludes, Britain probably would have lost the 1982 conflict.

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The history professor was given unprecedented access to documents in GCHQ’s archive containing around 16 million artefacts, many of them previously classified, to write the book.

The Cheltenham-based spy agency – which works alongside MI5 and MI6 – commissioned its first-ever authorised history to mark its centenary year in 2019.

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The need for secrecy in everything GCHQ does is taken to extremes, says the author, telling of an employee who found out his son had been killed in action in 1945, but could not tell his wife.
Employees, Prof Ferris writes, “internalise this idea that they should not talk about what it is they do. And not even tell members of their family and they simply get used to it.
“You have mathematicians who make a discovery which is five or 10 years ahead of what any civilian mathematician does and yet they can’t publish it.
“Now for most mathematicians that would be very frightening, horrifying, but they are used to the idea.
“They see themselves really as being given the opportunity sometimes to use leading-edge kit to do fascinating work. They are willing to live without getting the personal credit.”
Prof Ferris says that while the UK’s biggest intelligence agency has helped shorten wars and save lives, its work cannot compensate for failures of policy or military strength.
In 1937, for example, two years before the Second World War began, it advised prime minister Neville Chamberlain that Hitler and Mussolini wished to cooperate.
But, instead of acting on the intelligence, Chamberlain responded by asking the Italian authorities whether the accounts were true – and took their word when they lied.
Set up in 1919, GCHQ moved to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire during the Second World War.
However, the famous code-breaking efforts of Alan Turing and others in turning the course of the war are often over-rated by the public, Prof Ferris told the BBC.
He said their “amazing” work did indeed help bring forward the end of the conflict to some extent, but added: “Intelligence never wins a war on its own.”

The UK has become the first country to back studies that would see healthy volunteers deliberately infected with coronavirus after being given a potential vaccine.
Human challenge trials aim to speed up the development of vaccines and have previously been used in finding treatments for malaria, typhoid, cholera and flu.

The government has said it will initially invest £33.6m in the studies, although the research will need to be approved by regulators and the ethics committee before they can go ahead.
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If approved, healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 30 would be given a potential vaccine that has proven to be safe in initial trials.

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They would then be exposed to COVID-19 in a controlled environment and monitored 24 hours a day to see how the vaccine works and if there are any side effects.

The trials could begin in January and involve up to 90 volunteers.

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The studies would be conducted by Imperial College London in partnership with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and hVivo, a company that has experience conducting testing.
Supporters of the studies say the approach can produce results faster than standard research, as there is no waiting for volunteers to become exposed to the disease – which could potentially save thousands of lives.
Critics argue it is unethical to deliberately infect people with a disease, but supporters say the risk is low and volunteers are carefully selected.

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Dr Chris Chiu, from Imperial College London and lead researcher on the human challenge study, said: “Our number one priority is the safety of the volunteers. My team has been safely running human challenge studies with other respiratory viruses for over 10 years.
“No study is completely risk-free, but the Human Challenge Programme partners will be working hard to ensure we make the risks as low as we possibly can.”

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The initial aim will be to find out the smallest amount of virus it takes for someone to become infected.
Researchers would then study how vaccines work in the body to stop COVID-19.
Specially designed facilities at the Royal Free would be used to conduct the study, with volunteers monitored under strict conditions and medics on hand.

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There would be a controlled entrance to the facility, careful decontamination of waste and all the air leaving the unit would be cleaned so there is no risk to anyone outside.
Deputy chief medical officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said the trials could be used to find an effective vaccine.
“First, for the many vaccines still in the mid-stages of development, human challenge studies may help pick out the most promising ones to take forward into larger Phase 3 trials,” he said.”Second, for vaccines which are in the late stages of development and already proven to be safe and effective through Phase 3 studies, human challenge studies could help us further understand if the vaccines prevent transmission as well as preventing illness.”