Autism Test?? - Dog Language - Emotional Code - Visual Appeal

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/health/autism-tests-skin-hair-antibodies.html

Tests for Autism? Companies Are Selling Them, but Research Is Still Scant

By Azeen Ghorayshi

Academic research labs across the country are working to find biological markers that can predict whether a child is at risk of developing autism. And companies are rushing to turn the findings into commercial tests, despite limited evidence to back their validity, raising concerns that their results could mislead desperate parents.

They include one test that examines a strand of hair to rule out an autism diagnosis in babies as young as one month old. Two other tests just entered the market. One promises to predict autism risk based on skin cells collected as early as days after birth. Another looks for the presence of certain antibodies in a mother’s blood to determine whether her children, or babies that she might have in the future, are at risk of developing autism.

For decades, clinicians and parents have hoped for a biological test that could help determine if a child has autism. The push to commercialize investigators’ early research has accelerated as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has elevated the neurodevelopmental disorder into a national political priority, creating new funding for autism research and reviving long-discredited theories about autism and vaccines.

But the new tests, largely aimed as a screening tool for the general population, are not yet reliable enough to be offered commercially, outside scientists familiar with the tests say, especially in a landscape where families are already inundated with incorrect or unverified information about autism. None of the tests has gone through large experimental trials or had its validity evaluated by a regulatory agency.

“All of these tests are interesting hypotheses,” said Joseph Buxbaum, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who studies the genetics of autism. But they are “absolutely not at a point for any kind of clinical use,” he said.

    © 2026 The New York Times Company


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https://www.npr.org/2026/01/08/nx-s1-5667604/genius-dogs-learn-new-words-eavesdropping

These dogs can learn new words just by eavesdropping

Nell Greenfieldboyce

If you've ever had to spell out words like W-A-L-K or T-R-E-A-T around a dog, you know that some dogs listen in to humans' chitchat and can pick out certain key words.

Well, it turns out that some genius dogs can learn a brand new word, like the name of an unfamiliar toy, by just overhearing brief interactions between two people.
Your dog is a good boy, but that's not necessarily because of its breed
Animals
Your dog is a good boy, but that's not necessarily because of its breed

What's more, these "gifted" dogs can learn the name of a new toy even if they first hear this word when the toy is out of sight — as long as their favorite human is looking at the spot where the toy is hidden. That's according to a new study in the journal Science.

"What we found in this study is that the dogs are using social communication. They're using these social cues to understand what the owners are talking about," says cognitive scientist Shany Dror of Eötvös Loránd University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna.
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"This tells us that the ability to use social information is actually something that humans probably had before they had language," she says, "and language was kind of hitchhiking on these social abilities."
Fetch the ball — or the frisbee?

    © 2026 npr


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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jan/09/alzheimers-therapies-target-apoe-gene-variants-researchers-say

Alzheimer’s therapies should target a particular gene, researchers say

Ian Sample Science editor

New therapies for Alzheimer’s disease should target a particular gene linked to the condition, according to researchers who said most cases would never arise if its harmful effects were neutralised.

The call to action follows the arrival of the first wave of drugs that aim to treat Alzheimer’s patients by removing toxic proteins from the brain. While the drugs slow the disease down, the benefits are minor, and they have been rejected for widespread use by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice).

In searching for alternative therapies, scientists at UCL say drug developers should focus on two risk-raising variants of a gene named Apoe. Therapies designed to block the variants’ impact have “vast potential” for preventing the disease, they claim.

Dr Dylan Williams, a genetic epidemiologist at UCL, said: “Most Alzheimer’s disease cases would not arise without the contribution of just this single gene: Apoe. We need to think about it as a direct target. Almost all potential Alzheimer’s cases could benefit from Apoe-related interventions.”

More than half a million people in the UK, and more than 40 million worldwide, are living with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. Several genes contribute to Alzheimer’s risk and lifestyle is important too: smoking, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol all make the disease more likely.

Williams and his colleagues analysed medical records from more than 450,000 people of European ancestry to calculate how much Alzheimer’s disease arose due to different variants of the Apoe gene. People inherit two copies of the gene – one from each parent – and there are three main variants: Apoe2, 3 and 4.

© 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited 
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https://www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neuroscience/cracking-the-neural-code-for-emotional-states/

Cracking the neural code for emotional states

By Natalia Mesa

Nestled in the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus lies a cluster of neurons that can make otherwise mild-mannered mice fly into a rage. Stimulating these neurons, as if flipping a switch, prompts male mice to attack their cagemates.

The optogenetic manipulation of these and other specialized hypothalamic neurons, starting in the early 2010s, supported the long-standing idea that distinct cell types act as an “on” switch for different innate behaviors.

But it has proved challenging to disentangle the neural signals that underlie those innate behaviors from ones that drive an animal’s internal state—such as anger, hunger or sexual arousal.  

Mounting evidence suggests that the hypothalamus also gives rise to these internal states, which can shape innate perceptions and behaviors. Rather than triggering an innate behavior, a specific pattern of population activity encodes the intensity and duration of anger and sexual arousal, according to four studies published within the past three years. 

This work is “revolutionary for the hypothalamus community,” says Tatiana Engel, associate professor of computational neuroscience at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, who was not involved in the studies. It upends the notion that the neurons in the hypothalamus merely act as a simple switchboard, Engel says. Instead, local computations in the hypothalamus keep track of the animal’s internal state and influence its behavior, the studies suggest. 

The hypothalamic signals that encode the intensity and duration of aggression and sexual arousal can be represented by a mathematical model called a line attractor, the four studies show. 

© 2026 Simons Foundation
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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/brain-aesthetics-energy-saving

Easy on the eyes is also easy on the brain

By Sachin Rawat

One can spend hours looking at a calm sunset or a clear night sky. These scenes are not only effortless on the eyes — they may also be easy on the brain. People tend to like visual stimuli that require little cognitive effort to process, researchers report in the December PNAS Nexus.

The brain is the most energy-guzzling organ in the body, and visual processing alone accounts for nearly half of its energy use. Researchers have long studied how the visual system conserves energy. But the new study addresses the question from a different perspective. “Not only is the visual system optimized for efficiency, but we might have aesthetic preferences for stimuli that are efficient to process,” says Mick Bonner, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study.

Neuroscientist Dirk Bernhardt-Walther of the University of Toronto and his colleagues suspected that such preferences could have evolved as cognitive shortcuts, helping organisms avoid excessive effort as they navigate their environment.

To probe the energy consumed in visual processing, the researchers turned to an existing functional MRI dataset, in which four individuals viewed 5,000 images while their brain activity was monitored. Measurements of oxygen consumption in different parts of the brain provided an indicator of metabolic activity. The team also ran these images through an artificial neural network trained on object and scene recognition, using the proportion of activated “neurons” as a proxy for metabolic expense.

The researchers then compared these metabolic cost estimates — both human and artificial — to the images’ aesthetic ratings, gathered from more than 1,000 online survey respondents who scored each picture on a five-point scale. In both cases, the metabolic effort required to process the images was inversely proportional to their aesthetic ratings.

© Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026. 
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