Head movements, eye blinks, heartbeats, random fluctuations in brain waves — these are all common sources of unwanted signals, or ‘noise,’ in recordings of brain activity. Neuroscience researchers spend a lot of time using computational tools to extract meaningful signals from noise in their data. B…

By Adriana White I was diagnosed with autism at the age of 34, after a lifetime of misunderstandings. When I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s, autism was diagnosed almost exclusively in nonspeaking boys. It was a lot harder to get a diagnosis as an autistic girl – especially if you could…

Nearly 7 percent of autistic people in the United States have abnormal blood levels of fatty compounds called lipids, according to a study published today in Nature Medicine1. The study’s approach, drawing on multiple datasets, could help researchers parse autism into subtypes, the researchers say. …

Extra repeating bits of DNA may account for nearly 3 percent of the genetic architecture of autism, according to a new study1. The work is the first to examine such genetic variants in autism on a large scale. About half of the identified repeating sections occur in genes that have not been previous…

For her master’s thesis, Dorothy Clasen created a wearable that just might revolutionize how people with paraplegia and ALS interact within their environments. The wearable device, called [In]Brace, is a mouthpiece with a little attached magnetic object that can be moved by the user’s tongue. Att…

In the United States, children with autism or other developmental disabilities are at least twice as likely to have asthma as their typically developing peers are, according to a new study1. And across all developmental disabilities, asthma is more prevalent among nonwhite children than white ones. …

About 0.7 percent of children in China aged 6 to 12 have autism, suggests the largest study of the country’s autism prevalence to date1. And in Greece, 1.15 percent of 10- and 11-year-olds have the condition, according to the first estimate for that country2. Both figures fall within the range of au…

By Megan Amodeo If you’ve ever been around someone on the autism spectrum, you probably noticed that we tend to be extremely blunt. We don’t try to beat around the bush when it comes to telling the hard truth. If you don’t want the honest answer, don’t ask an autistic. Sometimes, autistic p…

A new atlas lays bare how neuronal connections, or synapses, change from birth to old age in mice1. The ‘synaptome’ may help researchers investigate how mutations linked to autism affect these connections at different stages of life. Synapses are the junctions where information is transferred betwee…

Under normal circumstances, Matthew Lerner’s day is full of meetings with graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, clinicians and research participants. His work focuses on how autistic people navigate relationships and what factors can facilitate or impede meaningful connections. Since the pand…

Every major city provides public transportation to its residents but how many really care about making there stations accessible for disabled people? The lack of accessibility in particularly one city’s transit system – New York City’s Subway, is very well highlighted in this short movie calle…

The rental home offers an indoor swing, weighted blanket, noise machine, headphones, fidget toys, and more.Source: The Autism Site

Illustration by Rebecca Burgess Emma Dalmayne heads up the not-for-profit organization Autistic Inclusive Meets where she uses her experience raising her five autistic kids and her own knowledge of being autistic to create a community where autistic people feel supported. There, she promotes the …

Mutations to the chromosomal region 16p11.2 affect people in different ways, often leading to some combination of autism, intellectual disability and language difficulties. Two new studies help to account for this diversity of traits1,2. Up to 25 percent of people with a duplication or deletion of D…