Spectrum: Autism Research News

This week, neuroscientists weighed in on differing brain sizes, Project Vesuvius and a Neuropixels tool.

Spectrum sources and reporters share which sessions they are most excited to attend at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, which starts on Saturday.

Representation was the theme of this this week, with a deep discussion on ‘profound autism’ and info about an upcoming conference.

Recent Twitter threads explore a new approach to autism diagnosis, a mysterious genetic region and social determinants of health.

Two threads pose intriguing neuroscience questions; plus a criminal-justice policy brief.

Threads on a GoogleMap for the brain and guidance on communicating with autistic people in a health-care setting garnered gobs of comments this week.

Our Twitter feeds were awash with research activity this week, including a review of autism intervention studies and resources to build better data-wrangling skills.

Highlights this week include two gene studies — one on the role of autism-linked genes in developing interneurons and another on the genetic origins of overlapping autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

The talk of the Twittersphere turned around two influential neuroscience papers, plus a virtual trip to the World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics.

Tickling our brains on Twitter this week were threads about helping neuroscientists learn the programming language Python, a study about autistic schoolchildren, and the possible root of modern humans’ brain power.