Autism News

The Boston Globe reports

Nine-year-old Jan Rankowski became suspicious when a teacher's aide began following him around with a clipboard at this small town's only public playground.

The aide talked to Jan's playmates and took notes on his behavior, said the home-schooled boy, who has autism.

Awares.org and the The Scotsman - Edinburgh,Scotland,UK are reporting that a new charity today pledged to investigate the “exaggerated and misleading claims” of some of the hundreds of treatments available for people with autism.

The Autism Intervention Research Trust is to fund research into the effectiveness of interventions to find out which work, which do not and which are potentially hazardous. Read on for more.

The Weekend Australian reports:

The discovery of a gene that controls the bonding process between infants and their mothers promises new insights into autism and other behavioural disorders.

An experiment in Italy has shown that knocking out a single gene transforms the way in which newborn mice relate to their mothers.

All major work on WrongPlanet.net has now been finished. We intended to officially announce the site on Monday, but we got ahead of schedule. Announcements are being posted on a few message boards, and press releases are being sent out. Here's hoping for a bright future for our website! Official press release

Recently, I've found some extremely disturbing opinion pages (and some quotes found in actual articles) in which an individual passes Asperger's syndrome off as some sort of "mythical flavor-of-the-month virus." This type of statement demeans the unique challenges that many of us face in addition to making apparent the ignorance of the individual who made the statement.

Various updates have been made to WrongPlanet.net in preparation for its launch this upcoming Monday. The changes made today include:

• Upgraded to PHPnuke 7.2
• Added new blogs feature (a different approach to the existing journals feature)
• Fixed bug with avatars (you will need to pick your avatar again if it is not displaying correctly)
• In the edit profile screen, the diagnosis and gender are now set by default to what you already have set.

BBC News writes Michelangelo might have had it. So, too, may Einstein, Socrates and Jane Austen. All are claimed to have had Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. What is it about this developmental disorder that can lead to genius? We will never know for sure if the genius of past greats may have been a symptom of a form of autism. Informed speculation that Michelangelo might have had Asperger's syndrome is just that - the Renaissance...