Among those Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently named to a federal autism committee are people who tout dangerous treatments and say vaccine manufacturers are "poisoning children." US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has filled an autism committee with friends, associates, and former colleagues who believe that autism is caused by vaccines. Autism advocates are now worried the group could pave the way for dangerous pseudoscientific treatments going mainstream. Last week, Kennedy announced an entirely new lineup for the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), a group that recommends what types of autism research the government should fund and provides guidance on the services the autism community requires. The group is typically composed of experts in the area of autism research, along with policy experts and autistic people advocating for their own community.

RFK's Overhauled Autism Committee Is Even Worse Than It Looks Kennedy has stacked another HHS panel with his fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Last April, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promised that his agency would find the cause of autism "by September." That didn't pan out, but this week he appears to be trying again--by stacking a decades-old committee devoted to "innovations in autism research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention" with his friends and fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world. Much like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy overhauled last fall with a full slate of new appointees after firing all the old members, he filled the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), which was first established in 2000 to help set the federal agenda for autism research, with Kennedy's allies in the anti-vaccine movement.

Woke wannabe LA mayor melts down during radio interview, says she deserves job because she's a MOTHER - then gets her own age wrong I got the'taboo' cancer soaring among women. Treatment saved my life... but I can NEVER have sex again. It didn't have to be like this AMANDA PLATELL: This single line in Brooklyn Beckham's nuclear outburst is brutal... but it's made me rethink EVERYTHING about Victoria and David The bitter trademark row at the heart of the Beckham feud: Why'devastated' Victoria bore the brunt of Brooklyn's eviscerating statement that has left her'on the floor in pieces' Cut BACK on breakfast cereal. Nick Reiner is'childlike' in jail and so out of it he cannot process the murders of his parents, insider claims The Osteopenia Plague: Almost HALF of over-50s now have the dreaded bone disease. Dark side of America's favorite vacation hotspot... where women are subjected to the most horrific sex attacks imaginable Disturbing video appears to show former Disney star shoving his ex-fiancée after'hammer threat'... as Matt Prokop is arrested for child pornography Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the hottest actor in Hollywood... then vanished: Unearthing family tragedy that sparked disappearance and has left'lasting' scars Shades-wearing Macron hits back at'bully' Trump and warns'we're shifting to a world without rules' where'international law is trampled underfoot and the only law that matters is that of the strongest' Trump reveals why he leaked world leaders' messages and his secret role in foiling a prison break in Syria: Live updates Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz's wedding guest speaks out and claims Victoria DID dance inappropriately with her son A person's facial reactions may reveal if they have autism, as scientists have found that those with the condition'speak a different language' with their expressions.

What if the idea of the autism spectrum is completely wrong? For years, we've thought of autism as lying on a spectrum, but emerging evidence suggests that it comes in several distinct types. These three words have become synonymous with autism, yet behind them lies a common misunderstanding. The idea of "the spectrum" suggests that all autistic people share similar experiences and behave in similar ways - only to a greater or lesser extent. The reality couldn't be further from the truth. Some autistic people may not speak at all; others are hyperverbal and extremely fluent.

CDC updates website language on vaccines and autism link, stating studies haven't ruled out vaccines causing autism spectrum disorder in susceptible children.

Auditory sensory overload affects 50-70% of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), yet existing approaches, such as mechanistic models (Hodgkin Huxley type, Wilson Cowan, excitation inhibition balance), clinical tools (EEG/MEG, Sensory Profile scales), and ML methods (Neural ODEs, predictive coding), either assume fixed parameters or lack interpretability, missing autism heterogeneity. We present a Scientific Machine Learning approach using Universal Differential Equations (UDEs) to model sensory adaptation dynamics in autism. Our framework combines ordinary differential equations grounded in biophysics with neural networks to capture both mechanistic understanding and individual variability. We demonstrate that UDEs achieve a 90.8% improvement over pure Neural ODEs while using 73.5% fewer parameters. The model successfully recovers physiological parameters within the 2% error and provides a quantitative risk assessment for sensory overload, predicting 17.2% risk for pulse stimuli with specific temporal patterns. This framework establishes foundations for personalized, evidence-based interventions in autism, with direct applications to wearable technology and clinical practice.

A reliable foundation model of functional neuroimages is critical to promote clinical applications where the performance of current AI models is significantly impeded by a limited sample size. To that end, tremendous efforts have been made to pretraining large models on extensive unlabeled fMRI data using scalable self-supervised learning. Since self-supervision is not necessarily aligned with the brain-to-outcome relationship, most foundation models are suboptimal to the downstream task, such as predicting disease outcomes. By capitalizing on rich environmental variables and demographic data along with an unprecedented amount of functional neuroimages, we form the brain modeling as a multitask learning and present a scalable model architecture for (i) multitask pretraining by tokenizing multiple brain-environment interactions (BEI) and (ii) semi-supervised finetuning by assigning pseudo-labels of pretrained BEI. We have evaluated our foundation model on a variety of applications, including sex prediction, human behavior recognition, and disease early diagnosis of Autism, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and {Schizophrenia}, where promising results indicate the great potential to facilitate current neuroimaging applications in clinical routines.

Take our quiz: How much do you know about antimicrobial resistance? A growing number of infections are proving impervious to antibiotics. This week we had some terrifying news from the World Health Organization: Antibiotics are failing us. A growing number of bacterial infections aren't responding to these medicines--including common ones that affect the blood, gut, and urinary tract. Get infected with one of these bugs, and there's a fair chance antibiotics won't help. The scary truth is that a growing number of harmful bacteria and fungi are becoming resistant to drugs.

Research reveals that those diagnosed with autism early show distinct genetic and developmental profiles from those diagnosed later. New research from the University of Cambridge suggests that autism should not be understood as a homogeneous condition with a single cause. Scientists found that people diagnosed in early childhood often have a different genetic profile than those diagnosed later in life, broadening the understanding of how the condition develops. The study analyzed the behavior of autistic people during childhood and adolescence in the United Kingdom and Australia. It also evaluated genetic data of more than 45,000 patients with the condition from diverse cohorts in Europe and the United States.

Communication challenges between autistic and neurotypical individuals stem from a mutual lack of understanding of each other's distinct, and often contrasting, communication styles. Yet, autistic individuals are expected to adapt to neurotypical norms, making interactions inauthentic and mentally exhausting for them. To help redress this imbalance, we build NeuroBridge, an online platform that utilizes large language models (LLMs) to simulate: (a) an AI character that is direct and literal, a style common among many autistic individuals, and (b) four cross-neurotype communication scenarios in a feedback-driven conversation between this character and a neurotypical user. Through NeuroBridge, neurotypical individuals gain a firsthand look at autistic communication, and reflect on their role in shaping cross-neurotype interactions. In a user study with 12 neurotypical participants, we find that NeuroBridge improved their understanding of how autistic people may interpret language differently, with all describing autism as a social difference that "needs understanding by others" after completing the simulation. Participants valued its personalized, interactive format and described AI-generated feedback as "constructive", "logical" and "non-judgmental". Most perceived the portrayal of autism in the simulation as accurate, suggesting that users may readily accept AI-generated (mis)representations of disabilities. To conclude, we discuss design implications for disability representation in AI, the need for making NeuroBridge more personalized, and LLMs' limitations in modeling complex social scenarios.