A NASA solar physicist is studying the Great Conveyor Belt on the Sun, a 40-year current of hot plasma, which may control the maximums and minimums of sunspots as part of the solar cycle.

It's interesting what you can see when you have somewhere new to stand and look.  The SOHO probe launched by NASA and ESA recently observed a train of comets crashing into the sun.

{loadposition davidh08}The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is a joint NASA / ESA probe positioned in a stable orbit approximately 1.5M km away in a direct line towards the Sun.

From this perspective, an uninterrupted view of the sun is achieved - any Earth-orbit device will be 'eclipsed' at some point in its orbit.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, Australian time, SOHO observed an amazing event – a comet performing a "sun dive," as Douglas Adams might describe it.

Closer inspection of the available images showed that in fact there was a train of at least 5 comet fragments – a vision very similar to that seen in July 1994 when Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided in 21 pieces with Jupiter.

Images clearly show a major solar flare or prominence erupting from the Sun soon after each impact.

Other sites discuss a number of aspects of the impact which may be of interest to readers.

 

The U.S. government is creating the National Broadband Plan, which is intended to accelerate broadband deployment across the United States. Actual speeds by Internet providers were already found to be about 50% slower than advertised during busy times.

Twelve years after now-discredited research first proposed a link between early-childhood vaccinations and autism; courts have finally rejected the claim outright.

{loadposition davidh08}A special US court, often referred to as the "vaccine court," was convened to test claims of a causal connection between the administering of a vaccination (generally the Measles, Mumps, Rubella, or MMR vaccine) and the onset soon-after of paediatric autism.

The court stipulated (on page 22, here) that any successful petition to the courts must present three things successfully. 

(1) "a medical theory" that causally connects the vaccinations and the child’s autism;

(2) "a logical sequence of cause and effect" that shows that the child’s vaccinations were the "reason" for the injury;

(3) evidence of "a proximate temporal relationship" between vaccination and injury.

The court tested two possible theories.

The first theory being that the vaccination itself was the cause and the second being that the mercury-containing compound Thimerosal, used as a preservative.

Neither theory stood up to the scrutiny of experts or the court officials.

{loadposition davidh08} According to the published decision "The undersigned [one of the three 'special masters' hearing the evidence] observes that while petitioners' experts were qualified, they lacked the specialized qualifications that distinguished respondent’s experts.

"The focus of the extensive research conducted by respondent's witnesses coupled with the significant clinical experiences of respondent's witnesses provided well-informed guidance concerning the various aspects of petitioners’ theory of vaccine-related causation.

"The testimony of respondent’s witnesses made clear that petitioners' presented theory of causation was biologically implausible and scientifically unsupported. Petitioners' experts openly conceded the limitations of their expertise during cross-examination, and the testimony given by petitioners' experts showed both internal inconsistencies and notable external inconsistencies with established scientific principles.

"These inconsistencies in the testimony of petitioners' experts–that were exposed, in part, through the testimony of respondents' experts–diminished the persuasiveness of the opinions that petitioners' experts offered, and, in the view of the undersigned, called into question the soundness of the positions that they offered."

In commenting on the mercury claim, Patricia Campbell-Smith, the master in the Mead case (quoted here) noted that vaccine opponents  "have not shown either that certain children are genetically hypersusceptible to mercury or that certain children are predisposed to have difficulty excreting mercury. "She also echoed a contention by vaccine defenders that a shot is safer than a tuna sandwich. "A normal fish-eating diet by pregnant mothers" is more likely to deposit mercury in the brain than vaccines are."

{loadposition davidh08}One of the Internet’s best-known medical sites, WebMD has an article on the topic which notes, rather tellingly, that "experts studied whether the MMR vaccine could cause autism. To do that, they looked for clues among kids who did and didn't get the vaccine.

"Since that initial finding, 14 studies including millions of children in several countries consistently show no significant difference in autism rates between children who got the MMR vaccine those who didn't.

"The bottom line: It's very unlikely that the MMR causes autism."

The New York Times also commented on the ruling, exposing one of the many motivators for parents to blame vaccines for Autism: "The master in the Dwyer case wrote that many parents 'relied upon practitioners and researchers who peddled hope, not opinions grounded in science and medicine.' "

It has been a long and difficult path for rational science to recover from the damage done by Dr Andrew Wakefield’s original research paper.  However, the paper is noew entirely discredited and extensive work has been done to expose those supporting the connection as seriously misinformed (to be remarkably kind).

Even with this decision, Dr. Offit (director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the inventor of a rotavirus vaccine from which he receives royalties) said, "it's very hard to unscare people after you've scared them."

Of course, nothing here will change the fact that a number of children have developed autism within a short time of receiving a vaccine.  However, the decision is clear – the vaccine isn’t guilty; in fact a number of researchers have pointed out that the vaccine is generally administered to children when they are at the same age that symptoms of autism frequently appear.

SAP has introduced its extended business program to the Australian market with a program which amalgamates hardware vendors, business consulting firms, integrators, resellers and independent software vendors, geographic locations and specialist expertise into larger networks.

Nokia is revising its definition of the industry mobile device market that it uses to estimate industry volumes, and hence its estimates of the size of the market and its share of that market.

As bandwidths on wireless broadband networks continue to increase claims that wireless technology will seriously undermine the viability of FTTH broadband networks get louder. Now a Singapore University has announced a research project that aims to take wireless networks to a new level of throughput.

Ever since FSF chairman Richard Stallman was accused of making sexist remarks at the GNOME summit in Spain last year, the free and open source software community has indulged in much discussion about the proportion of women in the community and the reasons for the same.

The U.S. physician who created the prostate-specific antigen test, the PSA test, back in 1970 says the prostate-cancer screening test is “hardly more effective than a coin toss.”

A Swiss-U.S. study has found that over the last half century North American birds have become smaller by about 1.3% in mass. The fairly rapid evolution to a more compact size is concluded to be caused by climate change.

Motorola has formed a global alliance with Microsoft to deploy Bing services on Motorola's Android based devices, to give consumers an alternative to Android's creator, Google, for search and map functions on their Android-based devices.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 retains and builds upon the tongue-in-cheek destructive action of the original.  In spite of the themes, it is difficult to not play through a session of this action game without an accompanying cheesy grin.

SME cloud computing specialist NetSuite has announced its intent to hook up with Google and offer its enterprise resource planning suite through the Google Apps marketplace – however it hasn’t said when the service might be available.

The space agencies for the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe, and Japan are eager to use the International Space Station for expanded scientific experiments, possibly through the year 2028.

Enforcement of an international ivory ban has reduced the numbers of elephants killed each year. However, any type of approval to lift that ban (even temporarily) will, in all likelihood, spur more killing of elephants for their ivory.

Scientists who study elephants are joining together for a moratorium on legal ivory sales around the world. According to the lead scientist in the moratorium, illegal poaching of ivory causes the death of 8% of the elephant population each year.