Spectrum: Autism Research News

A text-predicting chatbot parses text from conversations in a way that parallels brain-activity patterns associated with speech production and comprehension.

Five autism-linked genes widely known as chromatin regulators appear to also shape the cell’s internal skeleton.

Such high expression levels may account for the condition’s sex bias, a new preprint suggests — but not everyone agrees with that logic.

Iama Therapeutics is hoping a new class of molecule will prove successful against an old target in autism.

Drugs such as LSD act primarily on the serotonin system, which is implicated in autism — and some autistic people who experiment with psychoactive compounds report enhanced social connections, among other benefits. But researchers have more questions than answers.

Infusions of the hormone oxytocin may make mice that model autism more social by normalizing their brain activity patterns.

Biological factors that reflect autism’s roots may differ from those that influence how severe the condition is. Failure to make a distinction has stymied the search for biomarkers.

Next-generation machine-learning tools are poised to upend how scientists study behavior in animal models of autism — and not everyone is happy about it.

Autistic children may have a harder time catching a ball than non-autistic children do, possibly because they are less able to predict its trajectory.

Model fish seem to spend more time swimming solo than wildtype zebrafish do, and neurochemicals in their brains respond differently to social interactions.