How speaking is a lot like playing darts

Winning a game of darts requires being accurate. A player who can pick a spot on the board, focus their mind, and execute the specific motor action needed to land the bullseye will win the game. And if they miss, well, practice makes perfect.

Sigan Hartley, PhD – Slide of the Week

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) report elevated parenting stress. The current study examined bidirectional effects between parenting stress and three domains of child functioning (ASD symptoms, internalizing behavior problems, and externalizing behavior problems) across four time points in 188 families of children with ASD (originally aged 5 to 12 yrs).

Connecting research and clinics to help those with autism

One of the goals of the study is to discover how genetic variations in young people with ASD are related to brain changes that lead to clinical symptoms of the disorder, such as impaired social interaction and repetitive behaviors.

“If you think about it, in between genes and clinical symptoms [of ASD] are changes in brain development,” says Lainhart. “Genes first impact brain development, and as a result of changes in how the brain develops, there are clinical manifestations of what we recognize as ASD.”

David Gamm, MD, PhD – Slide of the Week

Numerous protocols have been described that produce neural retina from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), many of which are based on the culture of 3D organoids. While nearly all such methods yield at least partial segments of highly mature-appearing retinal structure, variabilities exist within and between organoids that can change over a protracted time course of differentiation.