Husband and wife research team Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl have shown that learning is a fundamentally social process, beginning in early infancy.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation may provide a noninvasive approach to studying how connections in the human brain change in response to new information, and how that process is altered in autism, says Lindsay Oberman.

Mice missing one copy of neurobeachin, an autism-linked gene that fine-tunes signals at neuronal junctions, show autism-like behaviors, according to a study set to be published in the March issue of Neurobiology of Disease.

Deletion of CHRM3, a gene on chromosome 1, leads to autism-like behaviors, according to a case study published 16 December in the European Journal of Medical Genetics.

The protein lacking in fragile X syndrome works with three autism-linked proteins to fine-tune the connections between neurons, according to a study published 21 December in Cell.

FMRP, the protein missing in fragile X syndrome, binds to the RNA sequences of 939 genes, 93 of which have been linked to autism, according to a study published 20 December in Nature.

Researchers can share and compare brain-imaging data on the UCLA Multimodal Connectivity Database, described in the 28 November Frontiers in Neuroinformatics. The resource builds connectivity matrices, which estimate the strength of connections between regions of the brain.

Teenagers with autism have an atypical balance between the right and left sides of the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain, according to a study published 23 November in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

A net decrease in inhibitory signals in the cerebellum may underlie the movement problems seen in the autism-related disorder Angelman syndrome, according to mouse research published 5 December in Science Translational Medicine.

Neurons in mice that model fragile X syndrome show immature, overexcitable firing patterns, particularly during sleep, according to unpublished research presented last week at the Salk Institute, Fondation IPSEN and Nature Symposium on Biological Complexity in La Jolla, California.