Community Newsmakers

Bram Cohen is the creator of BitTorrent, one of the most successful peer-to-peer programs ever.

"Bram will just pace around the house all day long, back and forth, in and out of the kitchen. Then he'll suddenly go to his computer and the code just comes pouring out. And you can see by the lines on the screen that it's clean," Jenna says. "It's clean code." She pats her husband affectionately on the head: "My sweet little autistic nerd boy."...

They were born within four months of each other, Fritz V. in June of 1933 and Donald T. that September. Fritz was born in Austria, Donald in Mississippi, but they had a surprising amount in common.

When Donald was taken by his beleaguered parents to Johns Hopkins University in 1938, he acted like no 5-year-old that famed child psychiatrist Leo Kanner had ever seen.

Fritz made an equally vivid impression on Hans Asperger, the pediatrician who...

In a story about Harvard president Larry Summers' comment about womens' brains being wired in a way that makes them bad at math, the Boston Globe reports that some of his colleagues believe that he has Asperger's Syndrome.

My friend recently told me about a book called Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism. Sounds cool!

"In this memoir, Dawn Prince-Hughes traces her personal growth from undiagnosed autism to the moment when, as a young woman, she entered the Seattle Zoo and immediately became fascinated with the gorillas." "Having suffered from a lifelong inability to relate to people in a meaningful way, Dawn was surprised to find herself...

Kim Peek - an autistic man who has been deemed a "mega-savant" for his astonishing knowledge of 15 grand subjects ranging from history and literature, geography and numbers, to sports, music and dates - is a part of a new NASA study to explore the changes in his brain since MRI images were originally taken in 1988. Not only was he the basis of the main character in the movie Rain Man, but he apparently is getting smarter in his specialty...

Daniel Briggs article: young man with autism urges people with the disorder to speak out against injustices.
DANIEL BRIGGS, a 21-year-old man with autism, has written an illuminating article for Awares called "My Life in Autism" in which he describes the hardships and injustices facing people with learning disabilities – but also urges those with autism to speak out, like he has, to avoid being “downtrodden.”
You can find this...

We have finally decided on the names for our two resident aliens, from the many that were entered.
We chose Zachary entered by Cobra for the green boy alien. His name will be shortened to Zak though. The girl pink alien will be Aspiella, as thought of by ShadesOfMe.
Well done to both of you! I'm sure the two alien friends are very pleased with their new names too.

Snottyboy has submitted many (at least 30) excellent stories, essays, and poems, to our writing and poetry section. Please take a look at these great pieces of work and please congratulate Snottyboy on the great work that he has done.

BBC News reports "Artist, David Downes, who has Asperger Syndrome - a form of autism - has just opened an exhibition of his urban, architectural and rural landscapes at a London gallery."