It's not a "useful purpose" to pursue a hypothesis soley on the basis of one fake study. That's money - enormous, mind-boggling amounts of money - that could have been spent on actual autism research.

Thimerosal was out of most childhood vaccines long before the scare, wasn't it?

Beware of conflating autism with autism spectrum disorders and asperger's syndrome. Classical, pre-2000s autism isn't a faddish behavioural disorder, it's the kind of debilitating condition that can require life-long professional care.

Autism is early onset, autism spectrum disorders are less clear. It's not obvious whether this is because they are early-onset but the symptoms are subtler and harder to identify, or because they're distinct syndromes.

At last, the real culprit is revealed: zinc.

I don't see how banning books is going to help when the gang is persuading people with knives rather than reading material. Of course for politicians (rather than boots-on-the-ground prison staff and their inmates) it doesn't matter whether it actually is effective, just that it appears to be.

They already killed it; Ouya is becoming a software platform that'll run on other Android devices, and the existing microconsole is probably going to gradually go away. If they have to compete with Google Play, they need to drop anything that developers might not like.

The issue they're describing is to do with voice call records.

Bear in mind that's same basic OS that has them selling $500 tablets while everyone else is at $200. That's not a bad job all things considered.

Spectacles are often preferable to laser surgery and contacts if you need vision correction. No eyewear at all is still preferable for most if you need no correction, though. I'm not sure there's a huge market for frames that only exist to hold up a little screen. Frankly, if they're so committed to glasses-wearers, they should come up with a version with a universal mount and adjustable fitting to sit on ordinary frames.

That seems like the most obvious thing in the world, short of taking the idea and transferring it into something people don't mind wearing like a wristwatch.

Forget FedEx. You call your phone company to set up service, that's a hop. Anyone else who calls that number, getting a phone service set up, is now within two hops.

Genius.

And like coders, many amateurs are so skilled that they become professionals, and many professionals retire or lose their jobs to become amateurs. It's a continuum, where your ability to move between the groups (be hired or fired) depends largely on merit, but also on a lot of other factors

Ridiculous. The creationists, anti-vaccination advocates, anti-global warming people, bigfoot hunters and investigators of Atlantis all tell me that scientists totes agree with each other on everything and never succeed by competing and challenging each other's ideas. That many quacks can't possibly be wrong about everything.

You can "ignite" the bush without immediately creating obvious smoke and fire. People cause brush fires by stubbing out cigarettes for the same reason, they think "the ground I stubbed this out on is not currently obviously aflame, therefore I'm good".

Err, Speedy isn't in the middle of anybody. All three parties are trading, individual, with the same fourth party: the market.

Alice, Bob and Speedy all know exactly where their transaction is going. It's classic arbitrage: whoever can identify an inefficiency and figure out how to place him/herself in a place to exploit it, wins.