"Going back to take another look at the decay data from the Brookhaven lab, the researchers found a recurring pattern of 33 days. It was a bit of a surprise, given that most solar observations show a pattern of about 28 days – the rotation rate of the surface of the sun.
The explanation? The core of the sun – where nuclear reactions produce neutrinos – apparently spins more slowly than the surface we see."
This sounds a lot like they are trying to fit an explanation to their data. Surely they would need some sort of secondary evidence for this kind of conclusion -- especially considering the topic at hand is brand new and unexplored.
See comments from sp332 on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629961
"It's exactly the sort of thing RATE (http://www.icr.org/rate/) has been talking about. The main point of the RATE project is to discredit the radioisotope dating methods. Sometimes they just send samples from the same rock formation to different labs and get different results. But they also spend a lot of time finding reasons that radioisotope decay rates might change over time.
This is all from what I remember from a conversation I had with someone involved with the project about 10 years ago. They got a lot of funding and a lot of interest back in the late 90's when they were just starting. I thought some of their research was interesting, but there was so much propaganda mixed in that it turned my stomach, so I stopped following it."
<placeholder for incorrect assertion about radioactive decay and atomic clocks>
This is what I get for hitting HN before caffeine...
I loved this: "What we're suggesting is that something that doesn't really interact with anything is changing something that can't be changed."
(The proposal is that neutrinos emitted from the sun are responsible for small changes in radioactive decay rates.)