Autism spectrum disorder is a group of social and neurodevelopmental disorders that include difficulty with interpersonal interaction, communication and excessive repetitive behaviors. Currently, though there are medications to treat some symptoms but no drug therapies exist to treat the underlying disorders.

Treating mice with a compound called SR1078 showed reduced autistic behavior in the mouse analog of autism, according to Thomas Burris, Ph.D., chair of pharmacology and physiology at Saint Louis University, by increasing the expression of genes known to be low in the brains of autistic patients. 

Researchers have managed to 'pluck' a single photon, one particle of light, out of a pulse of light. 

Though more urbanization has been linked by activists to better environment and various other social engineering desires, science has instead demonstrated the benefits of contact with nature for human well-being.

Rather than criticizing rural life while lobbying for more spending on city green spaces, it makes more sense to talk about just getting people out of the city mentality. For a paper in 
BioScience, scholars used nationally representative data from the United Kingdom and model testing to examine the relationships between objective measures and self-reported assessments of contact with nature, community cohesion, and local crime incidence.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been colliding protons at record high energy since the summer, but now the time has now come to collide large nuclei (nuclei of lead, Pb, consist of 208 neutrons and protons).

Representatives from more than 190 countries will travel to Paris next week in emissions-belching vehicles to dine on five-course meals and talk about creating a process to reduce greenhouse gases over time.  Then 170 of them will ignore it while the ones with few CO2 emissions will claim they are doing their part. 

An economics paper in Science estimates that the Paris pledges can reduce the probability of the highest levels of warming, and increase the probability of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, if they are implemented and numerical models are accurate. 

Scientists believe they have resolved a decades-long debate about how the brain is modified when an animal learns.

Using newly developed tools for manipulating specific populations of neurons, the researchers have for the first time observed direct evidence of synaptic plasticity -- changes in the strength of connections between neurons -- in the fruit fly brain while flies are learning.

Due to the relative simplicity of fruit fly neural anatomy -- there are just two synapses separating odor-detecting antenna from an olfactory-memory brain center called the mushroom body -- the diminutive insects have provided a powerful model organism for studying learning.