From EETimes:
Some kids in Tennessee made sandwiches. A middle school from North Carolina won the Future City Competition, for designing affordable housing for those in need. President Barack Obama spoke with some astronauts. Companies and organizations doled out thousands of dolla
You may have forgotten about it, but Microsoft got in to a bit of trouble with the European Commission for anti-competitive practices (including force-feeding customers IE). Microsoft's plea bargain was to add other browser options alongside its own.
The new screen, seen here, will pop up for any European Windows (XP/Vista/7) user who has IE set as their default browser, starting around March 1st.
It randomizes new choices for web browsers in an impartial manner, offering direct links to download. It's like Microsoft is saying, "Hey, it's cool, you can take Firefox to the dance. I mean, I handle all of your day to day tasks, like boring spreadsheets, plus I'm awake 24/7 keeping things running for you, keeping you safe. Oh, and remember that time we played Call of Duty all weekend? And we saved the world together? And you cried? I'd never felt as close to you as I did that moment. I thought that meant something. I thought that I meant something, to you."
Actually, Microsoft really should add that message after users make their selections, just so the European Commission is forced to label guilt as an anti-competitive practice. [Microsoft on the Issues via TheRegister]
In yesterday’s sessions at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Boulder, Colorado, four major developers of suborbital vehicles presented updates on their efforts. Here’s a summary of what they revealed:
Virgin Galactic: Stephen Attenborough provided considerable details about their plans to flight test SpaceShipTwo (SS2). Ground testing will continue until the end of this quarter, he said. The first captive-carry flight, with WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) carrying SS2 aloft but not releasing it, should take place by the end of this quarter. The second quarter of 2010 will be for captive-carry tests flights. The first drop test will be some time in the third quarter. That initial drop test, he said, “will be a pretty interesting moment for all of us on the ground, and a pretty interesting moment for the pilot as well.”
Attenborough said he hoped first powered test flight of SS2 would take place by the end of this year. There would be “a lot” of powered test flights in 2011, he said. His “best case” scenario for beginning commercial operations would be the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012, adding it would be entirely depending on the progress made during the test flights. “We can’t cut corners” on the test program, he noted.
XCOR Aerospace: Jeff Greason noted that development of the prototype Lynx Mark 1 was underway, which will be followed “as quickly as possible” (9-18 months, according to his slides) by the more capable Mark 2. Engine development, normally a limiting factor in the development of a launch system, isn’t a concern. “The engines are ahead of the airframe,” he said. The first test flights of the Mk 1 prototype are planned for the first half of next year.
Masten Space Systems: Fresh off its wins in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge last fall, Masten is pressing ahead with plans for a couple of different vehicles in the coming year, said Michael Mealling. First up, in the next couple of months, will be “Xoie v2.0″, an updated version of the XA-0.1E that won first place in Level Two of the LLC, now equipped with an aeroshell and the ability to do an engine relight; it will be able to fly up to about 36 kilometers. XA-0.1G, or “Xogdor”, will be built by October or November, will pick up where Xoie left off, flying eventually up to 100 kilometers using a new 3000-lbf engine under development. By 2011 Masten plans to fly commercial missions, and is even looking at the possibility of getting into the nanosat launch market through the use of an expendable second stage.
Blue Origin: Gary Lai didn’t make any great new revelations about the secretive company’s plans in a presentation, which he said was the first time a Blue Origin employee had presented any details at a conference. “If we’re famous for anything it’s famous for keeping quiet,” he said. The reason for that, he said, “is that we have a culture within the company to talk publicly only about results, and not about plans,” an approach similar to Burt Rutan.
While he didn’t provide much in the way of specifics, and no hints about schedule, he did reveal a few things. He briefly discussed Goddard, the gumdrop-shaped prototype of the New Shepard propulsion module that the company first flew in November 2006. “One of the main reasons for flying Goddard was to learn how to take a vertical-landing vehicle that uses the same propellants that our operational vehicle uses and learn how to fly that and turn it around in a very rapid manner,” he said. “Most of our lessons learned were in the operational area.”
However, he cautioned about reading too much into Goddard. “That is not necessarily what the operational New Shepard vehicle looks like,” he said.
"A ribbon-cutting ceremony with Endeavour commander George Zamka and station commander Jeff Williams to celebrate the arrival of Tranquility and its seven-windowed cupola on the International Space Station includes the placement on permanent display in the node of a rock brought back from the moon's Tranquility Base by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969, and carried by shuttle astronaut Scott Parazynski to the summit of Mt. Everest in 2009."
- Video: Moon Rock and Everest Rock Ready for Trip to the Space Station
- Preview: Confessions of a Moon Rock Courier
- Moon Rock Gains Traveling Companion for Historic Return to Space
- Playing With Moon Rocks and Duct Tape at the Dinner Table
- Photos From Moon and Everest Rock Event at NASA
We've heard much promise from environmentalists and the car industry about the effectiveness of "hybrid" vehicles — those combining electric and gasoline motors. But as it turns out, their efficiency is not much better than a small turbo-charged diesel car. On top of that, if you add in the ex
A leaked roadmap had previously indicated that Sprint would be launching a 4G WiMax handset sometime in 2010, and now the company has confirmed that we'll be seeing the technology within the next few months. But is the network ready?
Well, sort of. Sprint's been working with Clearwire on building up a 4G WiMax network since 2007, and while it's taken longer than they thought, they do have it up and running in 27 markets that serve 30 million people. But! Those markets currently don't include biggies like New York, San Fransisco, and DC, and 4G. WiMax hasn't been put to the test by a wide audience.
Still, they've got to do it sometime, and sooner is better than never for those who can use it. There's speculation that the handset in question will be the HTC Supersonic, an Android WiMax phone that leaked just last month. [Forbes via Electronista]
Both pirating (and legal streaming) offer a seamless viewing experience. DVDs and Blu-rays take the liberty of making you watch extra/unrelated crap. Oh, and like an airline safety briefing, one FBI warning is enough to cover me for life. [TheNextWeb via Lifehacker]
Fleet operators face many daunting issues, including the need for visibility of mobile assets, real-time tracking and forecasting, rapidly rising operational costs, and protecting the health and safety of workers. Keeping total cost of ownership low in that kind of environment is a challenge that ma
Everyone can agree that not all business plans come to successful fruition. So what happens when your most important project reaches an impasse and has to be abandoned? Your team is discouraged and some of them leave — either voluntarily or involuntarily — yet you still have to find a
Creating a test strategy can ignite technical and political rivalries that can make the best solution unattainable. How do you determine a test strategy? How do you balance fault coverage, product quality, and costs? How easily can you communicate your needs to management? Who has the authority to i
i want to run a small steam turbine using steam generated from solar energy.
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Beginning each fall, sea ice spreads across the surface of the Arctic Ocean until it becomes confined by surrounding continents. Only a few passages -- including the Fram Strait and Nares Strait -- allow sea ice to escape.
"There are a couple of ways to lose Arctic ice: when it flows out and when it melts," said lead study researcher Ron Kwok of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We are trying to quantify how much we're losing by outflow versus melt."
Kwok and colleagues found that ice arches were missing in 2007 from the Nares Strait, a relatively narrow 30- to 40-kilometer-wide (19- to 25-mile-wide) passage west of Greenland. Without the arches, ice exited freely from the Arctic. The Fram Strait, east of Greenland, is about 400 kilometers (249 miles) wide and is the passage through which most sea ice usually exits the Arctic.
Despite Nares' narrow width, the team reports that in 2007, ice loss through Nares equaled more than 10 percent of the amount emptied on average each year through the wider Fram Strait.
"Until recently, we didn't think the small straits were important for ice loss," Kwok said. The findings were published this month in Geophysical Research Letters.
"One of our most important goals is developing predictive models of Arctic sea ice cover," said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Such models are important not only to understanding changes in the Arctic, but also changes in global and North American climate. Figuring out how ice is lost through the Fram and Nares straits is critical to developing those models."
To find out more about the ice motion in Nares Strait, the scientists examined a 13-year record of high-resolution radar images from the Canadian RADARSAT and European Envisat satellites. They found that 2007 was a unique year – the only one on record when arches failed to form, allowing ice to flow unobstructed through winter and spring.
The arches usually form at southern and northern points within Nares Strait when big blocks of sea ice try to flow through the strait's restricted confines, become stuck and are compressed by other ice. This grinds the flow of sea ice to a halt.
"We don't completely understand the conditions conducive to the formation of these arches," Kwok said. "We do know that they are temperature-dependent because they only form in winter. So there's concern that if climate warms, the arches could stop forming."
To quantify the impact of ice arches on Arctic Ocean ice cover, the team tracked ice motion evident in the 13-year span of satellite radar images. They calculated the area of ice passing through an imaginary line, or "gate," at the entrance to Nares Strait. Then they incorporated ice thickness data from NASA's ICESat to estimate the volume lost through Nares.
They found that in 2007, Nares Strait drained the Arctic Ocean of 88,060 square kilometers (34,000 square miles) of sea ice, or a volume of 60 cubic miles. The amount was more than twice the average amount lost through Nares each year between 1997 and 2009.
The ice lost through Nares Strait was some of the thickest and oldest in the Arctic Ocean.
"If indeed these arches are less likely to form in the future, we have to account for the annual ice loss through this narrow passage. Potentially, this could lead to an even more rapid decline in the summer ice extent of the Arctic Ocean," Kwok said.
For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov .
JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
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For decades, climatologists have studied the gases and particles that have potential to alter Earth's climate. They have discovered and described certain airborne chemicals that can trap incoming sunlight and warm the climate, while others cool the planet by blocking the Sun's rays.Now a new study led by Nadine Unger of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City offers a more intuitive way to understand what's changing the Earth's climate. Rather than analyzing impacts by chemical species, scientists have analyzed the climate impacts by different economic sectors.
Each part of the economy, such as ground transportation or agriculture, emits a unique portfolio of gases and aerosols that affect the climate in different ways and on different timescales.
"We wanted to provide the information in a way that would be more helpful for policy makers," Unger said. "This approach will make it easier to identify sectors for which emission reductions will be most beneficial for climate and those which may produce unintended consequences."
In a paper published online on Feb. 3 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Unger and colleagues described how they used a climate model to estimate the impact of 13 sectors of the economy from 2000 to 2100. They based their calculations on real-world inventories of emissions collected by scientists around the world, and they assumed that those emissions would stay relatively constant in the future.
Snapshots of the Future
In their analysis, motor vehicles emerged as the greatest contributor to atmospheric warming now and in the near term. Cars, buses, and trucks release pollutants and greenhouse 
gases that promote warming, while emitting few aerosols that counteract it.
The researchers found that the burning of household biofuels -- primarily wood and animal dung for home heating and cooking -- contribute the second most warming. And raising livestock, particularly methane-producing cattle, contribute the third most.
On the other end of the spectrum, the industrial sector releases such a high proportion of sulfates and other cooling aerosols that it actually contributes a significant amount of cooling to the system. And biomass burning -- which occurs mainly as a result of tropical forest fires, deforestation, savannah and shrub fires -- emits large amounts of organic carbon particles that block solar radiation.
The new analysis offers policy makers and the public a far more detailed and comprehensive understanding of how to mitigate climate change most effectively, Unger and colleagues assert. "Targeting on-road transportation is a win-win-win," she said. "It's good for the climate in the short term and long term, and it's good for our health."
Due to the health problems caused by aerosols, many developed countries have been reducing aerosol emissions by industry. But such efforts are also eliminating some of the cooling effect of such pollution, eliminating a form of inadvertent geoengineering that has likely counteracted global warming in recent decades.
"Warming should accelerate as we continue to remove the aerosols," said Unger. "We have no choice but to remove the aerosol particulate pollution to protect human and ecosystem health. That means we'll need to work even harder to reduce greenhouse gases and warming pollutants."
By the year 2100, Unger's projections suggest that the impact of the various sectors will change significantly. By 2050, electric power generation overtakes road transportation as the biggest promoter of warming. The industrial sector likewise jumps from the smallest contribution in 2020 to the third largest by 2100.
"The differences are because the impacts of greenhouse gases accumulate and intensify over time, and because they persist in the atmosphere for such long periods," said Unger. "In contrast, aerosols rain out after a few days and can only have a short-term impact."
Factoring in Clouds
For each sector of the economy, Unger's team analyzed the effects of a wide range of chemical species, including carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, organic carbon, black carbon, nitrate, sulfate, and ozone.
The team also considered how emissions from each part of the economy can impact clouds, which have an indirect effect on climate, explained Surabi Menon, a coauthor of the paper and scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
Some aerosols, particularly sulfates and organic carbon, can make clouds brighter and cause them to last longer, producing a cooling effect. At the same time, one type of aerosol called black carbon, or soot, actually absorbs incoming solar radiation, heats the atmosphere, and drives the evaporation of low-level clouds. This process, called the semi-direct aerosol effect, has a warming impact.
The new analysis shows that emissions from the power, biomass burning, and industrial sectors of the economy promote aerosol-cloud interactions that exert a powerful cooling effect, while on-road transportation and household biofuels exacerbate cloud-related warming.
More research on the effects of aerosols is still needed, Unger cautions. "Although our estimates of the aerosol forcing are consistent with those listed by the International Panel on Climate Change, a significant amount of uncertainty remains."
Related Links
Related Q & A with Nadine Unger
› http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/unger-qa.html
Nadine Unger Bio
› http://giss.nasa.gov/staff/nunger.html
Attribution of Climate Forcing to Economic Sectors
› http://pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/02/0906548107.abstract
Nadine Unger Bio
› http://giss.nasa.gov/staff/nunger.html
Other Research by Nadine Unger
› http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/authors/nunger.html
Clean the Air, Heat the Planet
› http://sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/326/5953/672
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Imagine holding the entire sun in the palm of your hand. Now you can. A new iPhone app developed by NASA-supported programmers delivers a live global view of the sun directly to your cell phone. Users can fly around the star, zoom in on active regions, and monitor solar activity."This is more than cool," says Dick Fisher, director of NASA's Heliophysics Division in Washington DC. "It's transformative. For the first time ever, we can monitor the sun as a living, breathing 3-dimensional sphere."
The name of the app is "3D Sun" and it may be downloaded free of charge at Apple's app store. Just enter "3D Sun" in the Store's search box or visit http://3dsun.org for a direct link.
Realtime images used to construct the 3-dimensional sphere are beamed to Earth by the Solar-Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), a pair of spacecraft with a combined view of 87% of the solar surface. STEREO-A is stationed over the western side of the sun, while STEREO-B is stationed over the east. Together, they rarely miss a thing.
Telescopes onboard the two spacecraft monitor the sun in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. "That's why the 3D sun looks false-color green," explains Lika Guhathakurta, STEREO program scientist at NASA Headquarters. "These are not white-light images."
That's okay because EUV is where the action is. Solar flares and new sunspots shine brightly at these wavelengths. EUV images also reveal "coronal holes," vast dark openings in the sun's atmosphere that spew streams of solar wind into the solar system. Solar wind streams that hit Earth can spark intense displays of Northern Lights.
"With this app, you can spin the sun, zoom in on sunspots, inspect coronal holes--and when a solar flare erupts, your phone plays a little jingle to alert you!" says Guhathakurta.
Indeed, many users say that's their favorite part -- the alerts. The app comes alive on its own when the sun grows active or when interesting events are afoot. For example, a recent alert notified users that a comet just discovered by STEREO-A was approaching the sun. When the comet was destroyed by solar heating, the app played a movie of Comet STEREO's last hours.
 Representative screenshots from the app -- from left to right, a prominence caught in mid-eruption by STEREO-B, a sample of the daily news screen, and a sungrazing comet movie recorded by STEREO-A.› Larger image |
Another remarkable aspect of the app is that it shows the far side of the sun -- the side invisible from Earth. "This means sunspots cannot take us by surprise," Guhathakurta points out.
Recently, STEREO-B was monitoring a far side sunspot (AR1041) when the sunspot's magnetic field erupted. For the first time in almost two years, an active region on the sun produced a strong "M-class" solar flare. The unexpected interruption of the sun's deep solar minimum was invisible from Earth, but anyone with the 3D Sun had a ringside seat for the blast.
3D Sun was created by a team of programmers led by Dr. Tony Phillips, editor of Science@NASA. He says that version 1 of the app is just the beginning. Soon-to-be released 3D Sun 2.0 will offer higher-resolution images and multiple extreme ultraviolet wavelengths (preview). These additions will reveal even more solar activity than before.
View my blog's last three great articles....
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This week on Science-Based Medicine I wrote an article about a new study looking at the onset of autism symptoms, showing that most children who will later be diagnosed with autism will show clear signs of autism at 12 months of age, but not 6 months. This is an interesting study that sheds light on the natural course of autism. I also discussed the implications of this study for the claim that autism is caused by vaccines.
Unfortunately, I made a statement that is simply wrong. I wrote:
Many children are diagnosed between the age of 2 and 3, during the height of the childhood vaccine schedule.
First, this was a vague statement – not quantitative, and was sloppily written, giving a different impression from the one I intended. I make these kinds of errors from time to time – that is one of the perils of daily blogging about technical topics, and posting blogs without editorial or peer-review. Most blog readers understand this, and typically I will simply clarify my prose or correct mistakes when they are pointed out.
However, since I often write about topics that interest dedicated ideologues who seek to sow anti-science and confusion, sometimes these errors open the door for the flame warriors. That is what happened in this case.
J.B. Handley, writing at Age of Autism, saw my error as a way to demonize me before his enthralled mobs – and he dives into his task with gusto – although without much care or attention to detail himself, as we will see. Handley also is clearly not interested in what the science actually says, only in grabbing a propaganda opportunity.
First, to clarify the facts, here is the childhood vaccine schedule from the CDC. As we can see, the majority of vaccines are given prior to the age of 2, many in fact at or before 12 months. While “height” is a vague term, it is certainly inaccurate in this case. Before I explore this issue further, however, let me address the other factual claim made in that statement.
I wrote that “many children are diagnosed between the ages of 2 and 3. About this statement Handley writes:
Firstly, the last time I checked, the average age of diagnosis for a child with autism was somewhere between 3-4 years of age, not 2-3.
In fact, the average age of diagnosis is 3.1 years (although to be fair other studies give the average at 3.6 – there is some regional variation). This is “somewhere between 3-4 years of age” but Handley’s point is still incorrect. I did not write that the average age was between 2 and 3 but that many children are diagnosed between 2 and 3, which is certainly true if the average age at diagnosis is 3.1. In his exuberance, Handley simply got this wrong.
I don’t expect him to make a correction, however. The last time he attacked me, he make a rather amateurish mistake, confusing incidence and prevalence, and used his error as the basis of his criticism. He never admitted or commented in any way on his gross error.
But onto the substance of his latest attack. The point that I was trying to make, which I did in fact clarify later in my post, is that when parents attempt to date the onset of their child’s autism they typically will date the onset later than the true onset. As we now know, from multiple studies, true clinical onset (biological onset is likely earlier) is between 6 and 12 months. Parents may not notice this onset until much later, and formal diagnosis is later still. This diagnosis happens within the childhood vaccination schedule, so it is likely that parents will have some recent vaccine to point to when looking for factors that seem to correlate with the onset of autism.
That was my point – a point that I and many others have made previously. By pushing earlier the true clinical onset of autism this study adds to evidence against the involvement of later vaccines. It is true that many vaccine are given in the first year of life, and of course this study by itself does not let all vaccines off the hook – nor did I say that it does.
But I did discuss one vaccine in particular – the MMR vaccine. MMR has received more attention than any other vaccine as a potential cause of autism, thanks to the now-discredited work of Andrew Wakefield. The first dose of MMR is given at a minimum of 12 months of age, with the second dose being given between 4 and 6 years. Certainly this study is relevant to the claim that MMR is a significant cause of autism
There is much evidence to support the conclusion that there is no correlation between MMR and autism. It should be obvious that this study is further evidence against a correlation. If most children with autism show signs by 12 months, then a vaccine which is not given prior to 12 months cannot be to blame. This was not obvious to Handley, however. He wrote:
In fact, between the ages of 2 and 3, children receive all of 2 vaccines, accounting for 5.5% of the vaccines they receive, while a full 70%, including MMR, come in their first 12 months of life, perfectly matching the time when this new study reported the beginning of a regression into autism!
Wrong, Handley. The MMR does not come “in their first 12 months of life.” At the very earliest it comes AT 12 months, which obviously cannot be responsible for symptoms that are present by 12 months. Maybe Handley was just sloppy in his choice of words (but it is odd that he went out of his way to mention MMR by name). Or maybe he is guilty of all the things of which he falsely accused me. This is certainly the same kind of error I made, although more specific. My error was inadvertent and I have readily admitted my mistake and am taking great pains to correct it. Let’s see how Handley responds when this error is pointed out to him.
The bottom line is that this study does in fact add to the body of evidence against an association between MMR and autism, because of the timing of the onset of autism.
Handley also takes exception to my point that parents may not accurately observe and remember when the onset of their child’s symptoms were. He makes one obvious point – that onset is not a moment in time but a process. I agree – but never implied otherwise. But even for diseases and disorders of insidious onset, there usually is a relatively brief period of time when the patient or family member really notices it – and that is when they date the onset.
I have the experience of actually seeing and diagnosing patients, reviewing their histories and comparing them to documented evidence in some cases. So I, like other experienced clinicians, understand this phenomenon well. For example, I see many patients with dementia, like Alzheimer’s disease, and they or their family will often date the onset of symptoms at a point in time some months prior to presentation, often anchored to a specific event (a phenomenon actually known as “anchoring”). But when I probe for specific details, it is apparent that there were signs of dementia for 1-2 years prior to the family’s dating of the onset. Or, I may have the benefit of a documented exam or history, clearly showing onset prior to the memory of those giving the history.
Handley seems naive to all of this, and rather he is content to grossly mischaracterize my point as calling parents “dumb,” which, of course, I never did. This is because Handley’s purpose, in my opinion, is not to meaningfully explore the evidence, but to demonize scientists and physicians with whom he disagrees. Read the comments to his blog and you will see that his attempts at demonizing me and others are quite successful in the echochamber of his followers. He wrote:
Further, this notion by Novella that we parents are “telescoping” is simply the ridiculous introduction of a new and confusing term to try and explain away the chorus of tens of thousands of parents all screaming the same thing about what happened to their kids.
The authors of this study itself applied the concept of “telescoping” or dating autism onset as more recent that it really was. I simply used their term, which they in turn took from the literature. It is a well-described concept, not invented by me or this study’s authors – people remember events in the past as being more recent than they actually were. For Handley’s purposes, however, he wants to characterize a well-known and scientifically established psychological phenomenon as being equivalent to calling people stupid, or spinning reality.
I also showed that this phenomenon is absolutely relevant to the question of vaccines and autism, using the Cedillo case as an example. The Cedillos believed that their child acquired autism after receiving the MMR vaccine. However, home movies reviewed in the court case brought before the Autism Omnibus shows signs of autism in the first year – prior to the first MMR vaccine.
Further, Handley is now trying to argue that this new study supports a correlation between vaccines and autism. In fact, it does nothing of the sort. It does all but eliminate MMR, varicella, and Hep A as having any potential role in autism, as these vaccines all come after the onset of autism in most cases. Handley, if he were being intellectually honest, should admit this, but he doesn’t, and very dishonestly implies that MMR specifically is still a potential cause.
Average age of diagnosis of autism is about 3.1 years of age, and when that was the best information we had to go on the anti-vax movement argued that this showed a correlation with vaccines. Then clinical studies showed that the diagnosis could be reliably made between age 2-3 years of age, but that’s OK, that still correlates with vaccines. Now we know the age of clinical onset is between 6 and 12 months, and Handley is saying this still correlates with the vaccine schedule.
Since the HepB is given at birth, and other vaccines at 1-3 months, moving the diagnosis of autism up even further would still correlate with some vaccines. Since Handley is willing to blame any vaccines, regardless of type (live virus or otherwise) and ingredients (thimerosal or not) no age of onset would disprove his cherished vaccine hypothesis.
There is also nothing about the vaccine hypothesis that led anyone in the anti-vaccine camp to predict that the true age of onset of autism is earlier than it is being diagnosed, and certainly not to within 6-12 months of age. So Handley is just retrofitting – declaring whatever evidence there is as supporting his position.
Finally, Handley pulls the “pharma shill” gambit on me as part of his smear campaign. He trots out an accusation he has made before, portraying my association with the ACSH as being sinister. As I have already explained, my association with the ACSH is limited to me agreeing to advise them on areas of my expertise. That’s it. I have, in fact, performed zero work for them. I have had no contact with them, other than them sending me their public material, and I have never received any kind of remuneration from ACSH. I have corrected Handley on this before, so I know that he knows what he is writing is wrong, and he has failed to correct his errors.
Further my associations with the pharmaceutical industry are minimal – a couple lectures and consultations for nominal fees years ago (and nothing ever to do with vaccines). I have never received a dime from any company to express an opinion on a scientific topic, or write a particular blog or article. I suppose that Handley believes my many hours of work producing podcasts and blogs and promoting science and skepticism is all an elaborate smokescreen for shilling for industry, all without receiving a dime for my efforts, which makes me the worst shill ever.
Actually, I don’t suppose that at all. Rather I think that Handley knows that what he is writing is pure BS, especially since I have called him on it before, and openly challenged him to produce a shred of evidence to support his false accusations. But Handley knows the narrative of the anti-vaccination movement – everyone who denies that vaccines are evil are themselves evil shills for even more evil industry.
Conclusion
In the end, all that matters is the science, which clearly shows that there is no association between vaccines and autism. This one study has minimal implications for an alleged connection, except that it clears the most often implicated vaccine – MMR. It also supports other evidence that the onset of autism is earlier than many parents observe and much earlier than formal diagnosis, which calls into question any casual observations about the timing of onset to any potential triggers.
In my first article on this topic I was sloppy in that one sentence about the vaccine schedule – an error I have now corrected. But that error did not affect the relevant points I made in the rest of the article, which I have also amplified here.
J.B. Handley thinks he has scored some points for his side by jumping on my error, but he has only shown himself, once again, to be a propagandist with no regard for science, accuracy, or even common decency.
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I have a project that i am working on that uses a flat acrylic lens tipped on approximately 10°. When looking thru this lense there is a glare (or reflection depending on who you talk to) that is interfering with the view. I have found several coatings that are "baked" onto glass lenses, but has a
Such encounters between dwarf galaxies are normally seen billions of light-years away and therefore occurred billions of years ago. But these galaxies, members of Hickson Compact Group 31, are relatively nearby, only 166 million light-years away.
New images of these galaxies by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offer a window into what commonly happened in the universe's formative years when large galaxies were created from smaller building blocks. The Hubble observations have added important clues to the story of this interacting foursome, allowing astronomers to determine when the encounter began and to predict a future merger.
Astronomers know the system has been around for a while because the oldest stars in a few of its ancient globular clusters are about 10 billion years old. The encounter, though, has been going on for about a few hundred million years, the blink of an eye in cosmic history. Everywhere the astronomers looked in this compact group they found batches of infant star clusters and regions brimming with star birth. Hubble reveals that the brightest clusters, hefty groups each holding at least 100,000 stars, are less than 10 million years old.
The entire system is rich in hydrogen gas, the stuff of which stars are made. Astronomers used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to resolve the youngest and brightest of those clusters, which allowed them to calculate the clusters' ages, trace the star-formation history, and determine that the galaxies are undergoing the final stages of galaxy assembly.
The composite image of Hickson Compact Group 31 shows the four galaxies mixing it up. The bright, distorted object at middle, left, is actually two colliding dwarf galaxies. The bluish star clusters have formed in the streamers of debris pulled from the galaxies and at the site of their head-on collision. The cigar-shaped object above the galaxy duo is another member of the group. A bridge of star clusters connects the trio. A longer rope of bright star clusters points to the fourth member of the group, at lower right. The bright object in the center is a foreground star. The image was composed from observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX).
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. in Washington, D.C.
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It may not be a CGI apology (bet his wife would've loved that!) but Tiger Woods will be making his first public apology live on YouTube today.
YouTube is live-streaming the press conference from Florida at 11am EST / 8am PST today to the Citizen Tube area of the site. Tune in if seeing a grown man grovelling is your idea of fun—I'll be brushing up on my sext messages. [YouTube Citizen Tube via YouTube Blog via Electricpig]
UPDATE: Video below:
Nadine Unger, a climatologist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, spoke with NASA's Earth Science News Team about her recent study that analyzed how different human activities impact climate. The study appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February.NASA's Earth Science News Team: Your research suggests that the climate science community ought to shift its focus from looking at the impacts of individual chemicals to economic sectors. Why?
Nadine Unger: There's nothing "wrong" with dividing climate impacts up by chemical species, but it's not particularly useful for policy makers. They need to know which human activities are impacting the climate and what the effect will be if they attempt to curb emissions from a particular sector. Also, there's a great deal of complexity in our emissions that they need to be mindful of if we want to mitigate climate change efficiently.
NASA: What sort of complexity?
Nadine Unger: Some sectors of the economy produce a mixture of pollutants -- particularly aerosols -- that cause cooling rather than warming in the short term. Since warming can accelerate as we remove aerosols, we've been inadvertently geoengineering for decades with aerosol emissions.
Take the heavy industry and shipping sectors, for example. These sectors burn a great deal of coal and bunker fuel, which releases carbon dioxide, which causes greenhouse warming. But they also release sulfates, which cause cooling by blocking incoming radiation from the sun and by changing clouds to make them brighter and longer-lived. In the short term, the cooling from sulfates actually outweighs the warming from carbon dioxide, meaning the net impact of the shipping and heavy industry sectors today is to cool climate.
Compare that to cars and trucks, which emit almost no sulfates but a great deal of carbon dioxide, black carbon, and ozone -- all of which cause warming and happen to be very bad for human health. Cutting transportation emissions would be unambiguously good for the climate in the short term, while cutting heavy industry emissions would have less of an impact right now.
NASA: You keep mentioning "short-term" impacts. Could the climate impacts of some sectors of the economy change over longer time periods?
Nadine Unger: Yes. Greenhouse gases have a much longer lifespan -- or residence time -- in the atmosphere than aerosols, which typically rain out after a few days or weeks. This means that the impact of greenhouse gases can accumulate and intensify over time, while the aerosol effects become comparatively less important on longer time scales due to the accumulation of carbon dioxide.
NASA: You've mentioned industry, shipping and on-road transportation. What other sectors of the economy did you analyze?
Nadine Unger: Aviation, household fossil fuels, railroads, household biofuels (mainly wood and dung used for home cooking and heating), animal husbandry, the electric power sector, waste and landfills, agriculture, biomass burning...
NASA: What is biomass burning?
Nadine Unger: Mainly tropical forest fires, deforestation and savannah and shrub fires. We also looked at agricultural waste burning, which relates to seasonal clearing of the fields common in many countries in Africa and South America.
NASA: So, does this mean that pollution from industry and biomass burning is good for the climate?
Nadine Unger: No, not at all. Both of those sectors contribute to warming over the long term, so we'll have no choice but to reduce our emissions over time. But these sectors do mask warming from greenhouses gases in the short term. Just because an activity causes cooling in the short-term does not mean that it is ‘good’ for the climate. The emissions might disturb other aspects of the climate system including the amount of rainfall in a region and therefore the water supply to humans.
NASA: Where did you get all the information about emissions?
Nadine Unger: We used emission inventories assembled by colleagues. For instance, a colleague from the University of Illinois -- Tami Bond -- has some of the best information on some types of aerosols, such as black carbon.
NASA: But how can you estimate the impacts of emissions that haven't happened yet?
Nadine Unger: We used a computer model at GISS to look at future at climate impacts if we continued emitting pollutants at today's rate. Using this approach, we looked specifically at two snapshots in time: 2020 and 2100.
NASA: What can we do if we want to minimize climate change in the near term?
Nadine Unger: Well, our analysis suggests that on-the-road transportation and household biofuels are very attractive sectors to target. We can reduce human warming impacts most rapidly by tackling emissions from these sectors. In order to protect climate in the longer term, emissions from power and industry must be reduced.
NASA: Are there any uncertainties in your results?
Nadine Unger: There are. There's a large amount of uncertainty about how aerosols affect climate, especially through the indirect effects on clouds. Hopefully, NASA's Glory mission will help reduce the uncertainties associated with aerosols.
NASA: What direction do you see your research going next?
Nadine Unger: Our focus has been on global climate so far, but in future work we'll assess regional climate impacts, as well as other disturbances to the climate system, such as effects on the water supply and land ecosystems.
In addition, we plan to investigate many of the sectors in greater detail. In the power sector, for example, we might look specifically at power stations that operate with coal or natural gas. And in the on-road transportation sector, we might break out heavy- from light-duty vehicles.
Finally, we're planning to partner with environmental economists to determine the damage costs of emissions from all the sectors due to both climate and air quality impacts, results that we can use to develop alternative mitigation scenarios.
Related Links
Road Transportation Emerges as Key Driver of Warming in New Analysis from NASA
› http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/road-transportation.html
Attribution of Climate Forcing to Economic Sectors
› http://pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/02/0906548107.abstract
Nadine Unger Bio
› http://giss.nasa.gov/staff/nunger.html
Other Research by Nadine Unger
› http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/authors/nunger.html
Clean the Air, Heat the Planet
› http://sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/326/5953/672
View my blog's last three great articles....
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