An anonymous reader, quoting from CBS News, writes "'The first court award in a vaccine-autism claim is a big one. CBS News has learned the family of Hannah Poling will receive more than $1.5 million for her life care, lost earnings, and pain and suffering for the first year alone. In addition to the first year, the family will receive more than $500,000 per year to pay for Hannah's care. Those familiar with the case believe the compensation could easily amount to $20 million over the child's lifetime. ... In acknowledging Hannah's injuries, the government said vaccines aggravated an unknown mitochondrial disorder Hannah had which didn't 'cause' her autism, but 'resulted' in it. It's unknown how many other children have similar undiagnosed mitochondrial disorders. All other autism 'test cases' have been defeated at trial. Approximately 4,800 are awaiting disposition in federal vaccine court.' How did this happen when all the scientific data points otherwise?"

xkcd really hit the nail on the head today.

New calculations show how to make an electromagnetic "wormhole" — a tube that is invisible from the sides but allows light to shine down the center. The practical applications are a ways off, as even the design of a spherical invisibility cloak has not advanced beyond working (in theory) for a single wavelength of visible light.

spensdawg writes "Here is an interesting interview with John Romero on Games.net. He gets into the original design philosophy for the first Doom games, what he would have done differently, and his plans for the future. Worth watching if you want to know a little more about the mad scientist behind Doom." A warning: this is a video interview

libocannici writes "Abbeynet Labs has released the first version of a Firefox VoIP extension which is a full featured SIP user agent plugin for Firefox." The Firefox extension is completely stand-alone, with all VoIP functionality built directly into it. From one-click calling to SMS sending, this promises to be quite handy. All Internet calls are currently free, just requiring an abbyphone account, while PSTN calls have a small charge.

darthcamaro writes "Some may wonder why OSDL, the self-proclaimed center of gravity for the Linux Universe and employer of Linus Torvalds, does not include Oracle as a member. Well, in a recent interview Wim Coekaerts, Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle has spelled it out in no uncertain terms. From the article: 'The thing that was really kind of revolting is that OSDL goes out and basically says that they represent the Linux community while there is no direct feedback line back to the community.'"

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist is reporting on a new open source tool for writing up scientific experiments for computers, not humans. Called EXPO, it avoids the many problems computers have with natural language, and can be applied to any experiment, from physics to biology. It could at last let computers do real science - looking at published results and theories for new links and directions."