Researchers weigh in on the mounting evidence for a paternal-age effect in autism and what it might reveal about evolutionary mechanisms underlying the disorder.

Walking through Gordon Fishell’s lab now, you would never know that much of his research was swept away by Hurricane Sandy, almost exactly a year ago. But across the rest of New York University’s medical center, the recovery has been uneven.

Tim Roberts knits together physics, medicine and technology to trace the origins of language processing problems in the brain, hoping to identify a telltale signature, or biomarker, for autism.

A new method of genetic analysis allows researchers to identify regions that are identical on both copies of a chromosome, according to a study published 20 September in Molecular Cytogenetics.

Guidelines for the use of electroencephalography in autism will ensure that researchers have a common set of standards, which will speed up discovery, say Sara Jane Webb and Raphael Bernier.

About one in four people diagnosed with a group of rare disorders have autism, according to a study published 7 October in the Journal of Medical Genetics. The disorders all affect a single cancer-related pathway, driven by a protein called RAS.

Children with autism go to sleep later, wake up earlier and have less restful sleep than other children their age, reports an 11-year study published 23 September.

Researchers have developed software that can automatically track and catalog the behavior of up to four mice at once, according to a study published 16 September in PLoS One.

Clinicians should place children under age 5 who have developmental delay into a broad diagnostic category, called ESSENCE, which may then resolve into any number of individual diagnoses over time, says Christopher Gillberg. 

Two contradictory studies prompt questions about the reliability of self-report questionnaires in autism.