Autism News

Family and police review actions in search for teen. Andrew Grant is a whiz at chess, loves climbing trees, and is always up for chicken parmesan, chocolate, and even broccoli and carrots. But like most autistic children, he is afraid of sudden changes. So when police cars and canine units searched for him after he vanished Aug. 24, he panicked and came running home with blood streaming out of cuts he got in the woods outside his Myrtle...

WrongPlanet suffered some downtime as a result of multiple serious attacks to our server. These attacks could have been directed towards WrongPlanet, although it is highly likely that another one of the websites on the same server was targetted instead of WrongPlanet. A security professional has been brought in to analyze the attacks and pinpoint their source. We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused by this.

A new brain-imaging study indicates that a specially designed program for second and third graders deficient in reading boosts their reading skills while prodding their brains to respond to written material in the same way that the brains of good readers do. The same investigation found that the remedial instruction typically offered to poor readers in the nation's schools doesn't improve their skills and fails to ignite activity in brain...

The Alien naming competition is ending next week, so this is your last chance for entries. We asked you to pick some great names for our site mascots, the green alien and pink alien. We have recieved some good entries so far. You may enter as many times as you like and the winning names will be the official names of our two cute aliens. Email entries to [email protected]

More information on the contest

Auburn’s Autism Center recently received a $188,000 grant from the state Office of Special Education. The three-year subsidy is part of a state improvement grant for special education. The University’s center opened in January to serve children and families dealing with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The disorder affects children’s communication skills. Symptoms include difficulty with verbal and non-verbal communication and social...

Yesterday, we reached a very exciting milestone. We are now able to say that we have more than 500 members! I am very excited with how well the site is doing. We are now gaining more than 4 members each day (this rate has increased since the start of the school year). WrongPlanet has turned out to be a great and extremely peaceful community. I thank all of you for making this possible!

At a time when parents, schools and physicians still struggle with the perceived overuse of the medication Ritalin to treat children with attention difficulties, a new study suggests the potential for another controversy. Researchers at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt have found a new class of antipsychotic medications is being prescribed for an increasing number of TennCare children with attention...

Italian researchers have observed significant reductions of gray matter volume in areas of the brain associated with language processing among people with a family history of dyslexia in comparison with controls with no reading problems. Published in the August 24 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology, the study also lends support to previous studies suggesting intensive reading therapy activates...

A missing piece of a chromosome could be tied to autism. A group of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that one of their seven-year-old patients with autism was missing a certain section of Chromosome 15. Why is this such a great discovery? It’s important because this is one of the first times that a specific genetic problem has actually been found in a person with autism. In the past, studies looked at groups of...

The idea that studying music improves the intellect is not a new one, but at last there is incontrovertible evidence from a study conducted out of the University of Toronto. The study, led by Dr. E. Glenn Schellenberg, examined the effect of extra-curricular activities on the intellectual and social development of six-year-old children. A group of 144 children were recruited through an ad in a local newspaper and assigned randomly to one of...