The US Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) will pay over $1.5 million to the family of a child whose parents allege acquired autism after routine vaccinations in 2000. CBS called the payment to the family of Hannah Poling the “first court award in a vaccine-autism claim” (9 September 2010, CBS).

However, the payment does not acknowledge a vaccine-autism link. The payment was made for a mitochondrial disorder and encephalopathy which fall under a category of so-called “Table” injuries for which parents do not need to show proof that the vaccine aggravated the condition as long as it appeared within a certain amount of time after vaccination. The VICP, which was established in 1988 (US Court of Federal Claims), has made thousands of such payments since its establishment. The same court found no compelling evidence of a link between vaccination and autism in a ruling last year, which was upheld in a federal appeals court on the same day as the Poling payout decision, (27 August 2010, Associated Press).

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Almost as soon as the earthquake hit Haiti on 12 January, urban planners and scientists dusted off plans to relocate some of Port-Au-Prince’s infrastructure away from the crowded city centre, which is dangerously close to the Enriquillo fault.

In discussions with the Haitian government last month, geophysicists advocated relocating critical city infrastructure to the north (See: Haiti earthquake may have primed nearby faults for failure, Nature News). Now, at a United Nations donors’ meeting today, Haitian officials are due to present their Action Plan for National Recovery and Development, which incorporates recommendations to rebuild some of Port-au-Prince’s infrastructure in provincial towns further from the fault (New York Times).

At the same time, some Haitians have begun returning to their homes, or at least the lots where their homes once stood, encouraged by relief agencies keen to avoid flooded refugee camps during the upcoming rainy season (Associated Press).

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Publisher retracts paper by Iran’s science minister

Iranian scientists press for plagiarism inquiry.

BRIEFING: Climate summit fails to address key challenges

Lack of progress threatens global deal.

Plans for UK research assessment revealed

Peer review remains key for determining the distribution of university cash.

SPECIAL REPORT: German science looks to new political players

Coalition change could affect policies, reports Quirin Schiermeier.

Gold rush for algae

The second of four weekly articles on biofuels describes how oil giants and others are placing their bets on algae.

Climate summit fails to address key challenges

Are the global leaders listening?

Protein burns its evolutionary bridges

Mutations can set genetic change on an irreversible path.

Indian ancestry revealed

The mixing of two distinct lineages led to most modern-day Indians.

Buoy damage blurs El Niño forecasts

Missing data from the eastern Pacific Ocean may hinder predictions of this year’s event.

Research chief steps down over fake data

Peter Chen’s integrity ‘undamaged’ by incident, says boss.

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The first antennae of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) began the array’s slow invasion of Chajnantor, a 5000-metre high plateau in the Chilean Andes, aboard a bright yellow crawler yesterday. The final ALMA observatory will link 66 such antennae in changing configurations on the 5000-metre-high plateau. The site’s dry, thin air will enable the observatory to make very precise measurements of millimetre-wavelength and submillimetre-wavelength sources in the universe, including “cold clouds of gas and dust where new stars are being born and remote galaxies towards the edge of the observable universe,” according to the ESO.

Photo: ESO

“The extensive authorship list and comprehensive acknowledgments would imply that the entire peer group is now supportive of the Rodinia [supercontinent] hypothesis.”

Geophysicist John D. Piper of the University of Liverpool, who is not (USA Today).

“I realised if I was playing Superman, they’d put me on wires and fly me.“

Paul Bettany on getting over the intimidation of playing Charles Darwin in the film Creation (Metro).

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European spacecraft Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (Goce) begins its finely tuned gravitational measurements this week.

The BBC explains that the mission will track ocean movement and should improve on existing measurements of the Earth’s surface and its gravitational field—known as the geoid. Low solar activity and a calm upper atmosphere this week mean that the ion-powered spacecraft can fly just about 254.75 kilometres above the surface, plus or minus 50 metres, even lower than the 268 kilometres mission planners hoped for. The lower it flies, the more sensitive its measurements, which can detect changes in gravity as small as one 10-trillionth of gravity at the surface.

For Nature’s previous coverage, see Gravity mission to launch (Nature News, 11 March 2009) and on GOCE is Go! (The Great Beyond, 17 March 2009) from the time of Goce’s launch from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia. In case the science proves overwhelming, the European Space Agency has provided a helpful visual demonstration that Goce, (spacecraft, right) will map the gravity (represented here by apples, center) of the Earth (bottom).

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The US Environmental Protection Agency announced an emissions reporting rule today which will require producers of more than 25,000 metric tonnes of greenhouse gases a year to submit an annual report to the EPA. While the EPA already tracks big emitters this lowers the threshold and should account for about 85% of US greenhouse gas emissions, writes Mother Jones.

Other emissions-related fights are also burbling this week…

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Sydney has been hit by a dust storm the likes of which it has not seen in decades. Thunderstorms from the Indian and

Southern Oceans have gathered dust and debris from southern and eastern Australia at up to 100 kilometres per hour on their way to Sydney, according to Reuters. Other impressive dust storms date to a 1983 El Niño year, when droughts made topsoil vulnerable.

Many, many videos on The Guardian’s website.

Photo: Andy Tyler via Flickr

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Hydrolagus melanophasma is a slippery customer. It is a new species, in that scientists identified it for the first time this month, but it is also an old species, probably branching off from modern sharks 400 million years ago, and collected in jars by museums since the 1960s, writes National Geographic News.

And it was not easy to classify. “They have some shark characteristics and they have some that are very non-shark,” Doug Long of the California Academy of Sciences and an author on the Zootaxa article classifying the species told Wired News. The creature flaps its fins like a ray, is shaped more like a modern shark, and the males feature what Wired News calls a “most intriguing” retractable sexual organ dangling from its head. In fact, the researchers classified it as a member of the chimera order, also known as ghost sharks.

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The elephant and the neutrino

Conservationists challenge physics observatory in Indian wildlife reserve.

Genomics shifts focus to rare diseases

Disappointing genome-wide studies prompt researchers to tackle single-gene defects.