Science & Technology

A large new government study should reassure parents who are afraid that kids are getting autism because they receive too many vaccines too early in life.

The study, by researchers at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, found no connection between the number of vaccines a child received and his or her risk of autism spectrum disorder. It also found that even though kids are getting more vaccines these days, those vaccines contain many fewer of the substances that provoke an immune response.

If you think programming a clock radio is hard, try reprogramming life itself. That's the goal of Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University.

Endy has been working with a laboratory strain of E. coli bacteria. He sees the microbes as more than just single-cell organisms. They're little computers.

"Any system that's receiving information, processing information and then using that activity to control what happens next, you can think of as a computing system," Endy says.

Texas is the next expansion state for the development of flu vaccines, thanks to a $91 million federally-funded program.

GlaxoSmithKline will use the facility at Texas A&M to work on the next generation of flu vaccines, based on a trademarked proprietary cell-culture line instead of using fertilized chicken eggs.

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Police in Europe are investigating a large-scale cyberattack. Some are even calling it the largest of its kind. As NPR's Martin Kaste reports, the attack's target is an organization called Spamhaus, but the effects have spilled out into the broader Internet.

What had earlier been widely billed as the largest cyberattack in history, causing Web-wide disruptions for Internet users, appears on closer inspection to have been not quite so dramatic as first thought. But what did it mean for the innocent bystander sitting at his or her computer?

Probably not much, as it turns out — particularly if that bystander's computer wasn't in Europe.

Poke into the obscure corners of the Federal Communications Commission's website, and you can find one of the deepest disclosures in campaign finance.