The elderly veteran used a $25 Market Basket gift card to pay for most of his groceries but had come up about $3 short of his total. The post Cashier with Autism Steps Up to Help Veteran Who Couldn’t Pay His Full Grocery Bill appeared first on The Autism Site News. Source: The Autism Site

An analysis of whole-genome sequences from thousands of families — one of the largest such studies to date — has linked 163 new genes to autism. The study appeared today in Nature Genetics. The newly linked genes harbor ultra-rare inherited genetic variants — alterations to the genome that were pass…

Ofer Yizhar photographed war zones before he ever imaged a mouse brain. Today, the former documentary photographer in the Israeli army is professor of neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, where he builds tools — such as engineered proteins and neural probes — to mani…

Hello, and welcome to this week’s Community Newsletter! I’m your host, Chelsey B. Coombs, Spectrum’s engagement editor. A new paper in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders caused a huge uproar on Twitter this week. “Rising prevalence, the shift from child to adult-dominated costs, the t…

She's currently studying for two college degrees and hopes to become an astronaut. The post Meet Adhara Pérez, The 9-Year-Old With A Higher IQ Than Einstein appeared first on The Autism Site News. Source: The Autism Site

The sleep difficulties some autistic people experience may be due in part to leaks in the barrier that protects the brain from any toxins or pathogens in the blood, according to a new study in fruit flies. The work also suggests that a behavioral treatment for chronic insomnia could help to alleviat…

“I struggle with visualising that first-imagined image; however, I know what it is I want to create. This disconnect was frustrating for me, so I taught myself this 4-stage process which works well to help me reach my desired artistic outcome.” By Sheryl Hanna-Kumas The migration of my autistic artw…

Register for the next Spectrum webinar, featuring Laurent Mottron, professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal in Canada. He will discuss his June 2021 commentary in Autism Research on why we need “a radical change in our autism research strategy.” He says that because autism diagnosis is …

The post Spotted around the web: Mitochondria, police training, supporting scientists with disabilities appeared first on Spectrum | Autism Research News. Source: Spectrum News

Difficulty navigating social interactions pervades even the earliest accounts of autism. This defining trait of the condition has informed prevailing theories of its roots as well as the design of many autism treatments. But an emerging line of work supports a more nuanced look at the social abiliti…

By Ron Sandison The killing of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers sparked riots and public debate on the conduct of law enforcement, even having some suggest disbanding the police force. What if the law enforcement is not the main problem but how it operates for profit and lack of tra…

By Lyric Holmans, Neurodivergent Rebel I learned I was Autistic at the age of 29, after almost thirty years of struggling in life and not knowing why I struggled with things that people around me often took for granted. When you have a hard time with the easy things, it’s difficult to ap…

A new method can map the paths of thousands of neurons in mice, while also quantifying the expression of dozens of genes in those cells. The technique, called BARseq2 and described in Nature Neuroscience in May, could help researchers build a large-scale map of the neural circuits relevant to autism…

Autism researchers routinely rely on a range of methods to precisely control the activity of specific neural circuits in the brains of awake animals. They have used these methods extensively to study basic neural control of social behavior and how changes to brain circuits may contribute to the soci…