If you’ve ever been to one of the few Amazon Go stores, you have experienced “contactless shopping” – you walk in, grab the items you need and simply walk out! The store is equipped with cameras and sensors and the entire system has the ability to identify what you grabbed. Once you walk out, …

Guest post by Emily Ansell Elfer, BA Hons, Dip. Ask any parent about potty training their child and... The post Autism and Potty Training: Tips for Toileting Success appeared first on The Autism Site News. Source: The Autism Site

Hello, and welcome to this week’s Community Newsletter! I’m your host, Chelsey B. Coombs, Spectrum’s engagement editor. A flurry of tweets this week touted a new Autism study from researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. How can we create inclusive methods to capture experiences of aut…

The post What studying worms, flies and fish says about autism appeared first on Spectrum | Autism Research News. Source: Spectrum News

The communication and language difficulties seen in people with autism are challenging to study in animals, for obvious reasons. But scientists have seen parallels between human speech and the songs of some birds. Young male zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) learn to sing by listening to and imita…

Usually, conversations justifying animal models of autism center on how similar a species is to humans. But Gül Dölen takes a different view. “What if we went for the animal that is least similar to humans?” says Dölen, associate professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore…

The post Spotted around the web: PTEN organoids, virtual reality, decolonizing science appeared first on Spectrum | Autism Research News. Source: Spectrum News

Brain scans from 16 mouse models of autism reveal at least four distinct patterns of brain activity, a new study suggests. The findings lend fresh support to the popular idea that autism is associated with a range of brain ‘signatures.’ Telltale neural signatures of autism have long proved elusive, …

The Art of Autism’s 2nd post for our 6th Annual Art and Poems for Peace. See first compilation here. Header image: April Tobin “Bird in Flight” Art and Poems for Peace is compiled by The Art of Autism and includes this message from the Youth Assembly, which will meet for an annual…

A new gene delivery system taps a protein found in people to encapsulate messenger RNA (mRNA), the intermediary between genes and proteins, and transport it into cells. The technique may help researchers ferry gene therapies or the gene editor CRISPR into tissues throughout the body. “We’ve be…

Earlier this year, researchers reported striking similarities in the functions of 10 autism genes: They all affect brain size and boost the number of immature neurons in the brain. The work raised hopes of finding common biological paths to autism. Most studies on gene function are done in mice, but…

The 2021 San Diego Festival of the Arts (www.sdfestivalarts.org) will celebrate its 35th show by relocating to the San Diego Surf Club Soccer Park in North San Diego, formerly the Del Mar polo fields, on Saturday and Sunday, September 11 and 12 from 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM on Saturday and 10:00 AM …

Over the past century, scientists have used a variety of animal models to advance their understanding of the developing brain and autism. Here’s a chronology of some of the landmark discoveries involving uncommon autism models.   1916Notch up:Biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan identifies a frui…

In the past two decades, some autism researchers have turned to simple animals, such as roundworms, fruit flies and zebrafish, for their investigations. Others have sought answers from experiments with frogs, birds and even octopuses. In this special report, we describe these discoveries and the imp…