Petrus de Vries is on a quest to outfit Africa, the continent of his birth, with trained autism researchers and service providers.

Tweets this week feature research about the increases in downloads and citations papers get through social-media shares, as well as findings that tie three autism-linked genes to a new point of convergence.

Pick up threads about how remote learning can benefit autistic students, why a study about screen time deserves scrutiny and how a newly discovered form of cellular communication could yield clues about autism.

A researcher and science officer give tips for getting started with grant writing; scientists on Twitter explain why they went tenure-track; and a neurobiologist discusses why the field’s next generation needs to learn to code.

This week’s Community Newsletter takes up tweets about how often autism intervention research fails to report participants’ race and ethnicity, benchmarks for effect sizes and mapping chandelier cells in the mouse visual cortex.

In this week’s newsletter, we feature tweets about the Lancet Commission, a new initiative from the International Society for Autism Research, a highlighted paper about the link between autism and the microbiome, and reactions to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decision to acknowledge a hair-based autism test.

Twitter is talking about a review of how to make autistic people more comfortable during magnetic resonance imaging scans, and a study that upends a popular idea about learning — namely, that it requires long-term potentiation of synapses.

When pediatrician Kristin Sohl isn’t building programs to improve care for and research about autistic people, you can find her reading psychological thrillers or playing Pokémon Go.

In this week’s Community Newsletter, we look at conversations around a study of trauma and autism traits in older adults, and an editorial that looks back at late child psychiatrist Sir Michael Rutter’s contributions to the field.

As 2021 comes to a close, Spectrum recaps some of the biggest trends in autism science this year: studies of sex differences, noncoding regions of the genome and points of convergence, as well as efforts to improve screening and participatory research.