[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams looks at the genesis of ocean worlds. Having a nearly massive star producing lots of radioactive aluminum when it supernovas might be surprisingly important.
• The Crux takes a look at languages newly forming in the world around us, starting with the Australian language of Light Warlpiri. What does this say about humans and language?
• D-Brief notes that researchers have managed to create cyborg rats whose motions are controlled directly by human thought.
• Gizmodo reports on the abandonment by Amazon of its plan for a HQ2 campus in Queens.
• JSTOR Daily shares the perfectly believable argument that people with autism should not be viewed as people incapable of love.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Simon Balto writes about how the Ryan Adams scandal demonstrates the male gatekeeper effect in popular music.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution comes up with a list of winners and losers of the Amazon decision not to set up HQ2 in Queens. (Myself, I am unconvinced New York City is a loser here.)
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains how, despite not interacting directly with normal matter, dark matter can still be heated up by the matter and energy we see around us.
• Window on Eurasia notes how, in many post-Soviet countries including the Baltic States and Ukraine, ethnic Russians are assimilating into local majority ethnic groups.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Beyond the Beyond notes new legislation in China that aims to create a local cyberspace.
• The Broadside Blog reacts to the election of Donald Trump.
• Centauri Dreams notes a SETI scan of Proxima Centauri b.
• Joe. My. God. notes a California referendum proposal to ban the in-state production of condomless porn failed.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that Clinton won the popular vote.
• The Map Room Blog shares a map of Southeast Asia’s rail lines.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen argues that President Trump will not be a classical conservative in office.
• The New APPS Blog analyzes the election.
• The NYRB Daily and Beyond the Beyond note the impact of Donald Trump in Europe.
• Peter Rukavina shares his discovery of an Island autism library.
• The Volokh Conspiracy jokes about the two parties’ supporters needing to swap their criticisms.
• Window on Eurasia looks at Russia-Ukraine differences on their shared history and reports on the migration of large numbers of Muslim refugees in Ukraine away from Russia-controlled areas.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Dragon’s Gaze notes evidence that Kardashev Type III civilizations do not exist.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes the new Kenya-Somalia border war, suggests the United Arab Emirates will be building a mountain to try to trigger rain, and notes that the new French-built submarines of Australia will come with American tech parts.
• Language Log looks at the changing meaning of “feel”.
• Marginal Revolution suggests Russian power might be on an upswing and looks at European Union proposals to fine countries which do not accept refugees.
• The NYRB Daily notes the controversy surrounding Poland’s Second World War museum at Gdansk.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at robotic activity around the solar system.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer considers the question of whether or not Napoleonic rule did kickstart growth in western Germany.
• Savage Minds continues the discussion of decolonizing anthropology.
• Torontoist notes a protest tomorrow by Ontario parents unhappy that the provincial government will not cover enough of an effective autism program.
• Window on Eurasia looks at class divisions in Russia and notes a proposal to divert water from Siberian rivers to China.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO notes that Diner en blanc will be returning to Toronto this summer.
• D-Brief observes that DNA testing of the skeleton of Kennewick Man reveals the person to have been of indigenous American background.
• The Dragon’s Gaze links to a paper making the case for circumbinary exoplanets orbiting compact binaries.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes the controversy over the question of whether flooding doomed pre-Columbian Cahokia.
• In the aftermath of the Charleston tragedy, Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the close linkage of the Confederate flag to racism.
• Marginal Revolution looks at rhetoric of austerity in Greece.
• The New APPS Blog considers the inhibitory role of copyright in popular culture.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw muses that the clash of ideologies is fundamentally irrelevant to Australian life, that things work differently than left versus right.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes transient hot spots on Venus indicative of volcanism.
• Peter Rukavina celebrated Autism Acceptance Day yesterday, and his son Oliver.
• Mark Simpson notes the ridiculous rhetoric of masculinity with commercial products.
• Speed River Journals’ Van Waffle celebrates the rebirth of St. Jacob’s Farmer’s Market.
• Towleroad shares a video of Lady Gaga’s stunning performance of “Imagine.”
• Window on Eurasia is skeptical about the prospects of the Russian economy and argues Ukrainians should not hope for much from Russia.

[LINK] “Autistic Coders Get Jobs as Microsoft, SAP Woo Software Sleuths”

Bloomberg’s Olga Kharif reports on one occupational niche where people with certain kinds of autism thrive.

David McNabb graduated from college with a computer science degree in 2001 yet never found a job in his field or any field, failing at interview after interview.

Those meetings with prospective employers “were definitely a large stumbling block,” said McNabb, 36, who was diagnosed with autism last year. “I wasn’t on the same page as far as what they were looking for in a person, or maybe the type of person they’d wanted to work with.”

He finally embarked on his professional life about five months ago, when he began working from home for Ultra Testing, a 2 1/2-year-old startup that tests software for companies. Eighty percent of Ultra’s workforce has an autism spectrum disorder.

Many people with autism, which impedes social and communication skills, are unemployed, and those who work often have low-paying jobs. Interviews are hard because many have trouble making eye contact and are sensitive to noise or light. Yet, like McNabb, some are high-functioning and exceptional at repetitive tasks, recognizing data patterns and finding bugs in software — a good fit for the technology industry. Microsoft Corp., SAP SE, Freddie Mac and HP Australia have initiated programs to hire people on the autism spectrum.

“It’s definitely been a very good break for me, just getting traction, being able to show that I can be working and contribute to a team,” said McNabb, who lives with his father and stepmother in Flossmoor, Illinois. He spent all those years helping family members with computer issues, volunteering and tinkering at home with operating systems and software to see what makes them tick.

[LINK] “New Gene Studies Suggest There Are Hundreds of Kinds of Autism”

Wired shared Sarah DeWeerdt’s fascinating article which uses the latest researches in genetics to argue that “autism” is not a single condition but rather a vast and diverse clade of superficially similar genetic conditions. This understood diversity has obvious implications for treatment.

Rather than recruiting people with autism based on outward characteristics, some researchers are turning this flood of genetic information into an advantage: They are classifying children with autism based on their genetics, and thoroughly characterizing each subgroup to map autism’s landscape as a whole. These ‘genetics-first’ studies, including the one in which Waylon and Geoffrey participate, may help researchers to construct a meaningful taxonomy of autism and understand the source of its diversity. Eventually, such studies may even lead to treatments that address the root cause of a child’s autism, rather than just the symptoms.

Researchers have known for a couple of decades from genetic disorders closely related to autism, such as Rett syndrome and fragile X syndrome, that people with a disruption in the same gene often have similar symptoms. In the past ten years or so, advances in technologies for sequencing and analyzing DNA have provided hints that the same is often true for people with so-called idiopathic autism, or autism of unknown cause.

Beginning in the mid-2000s, microarray technology revealed that people with autism tend to carry many copy number variations, deletions or duplications of large stretches of DNA that encompass multiple genes. Researchers soon saw that people who harbor the same copy number variants often share other characteristics and symptoms as well.

To investigate these commonalities, some teams began to look into subgroups of people with a common chromosomal alteration. The most comprehensive of these projects so far is the Simons Variation in Individuals Project (Simons VIP), which is characterizing about 200 people with variations of a chromosomal region called 16p11.2. (The Simons VIP is funded by the Simons Foundation, SFARI.org’s parent organization.) About 20 percent of individuals with deletions in this region and 10 percent with duplications have autism.

In the past couple of years, it has become feasible to look more closely at the DNA of people with autism by analyzing all of the protein-coding sequences in their genomes — about 1 percent of the roughly 3 billion base pairs that make up each genome. This approach has revealed that many people with autism have mutations that aren’t found in people without the disorder, but few people with autism share the same mutation. Despite analyzing genetic material from more than 2,500 people with autism, “We almost never saw the same gene hit twice,” says Evan Eichler, professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington and a leader of one of the first of these studies.

[LINK] “New research can help predict autism at earlier age: SickKids scientists”

This CTV report about a breakthrough at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children in identifying genes associated with autism conveys remarkable news. Diagnosis of autism, even treatment, will become much less difficult. (Conversely, the identification of so many different associated genes may also emphasize that autism isn’t a unitary disease–it may be better to speak of “autisms”.)

Scientists at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children say they have unraveled the genetic code associated with autism, which will help detect the disorder at an earlier age.

In a study published Sunday in the online edition of Nature Genetics, SickKids researchers say they’ve been able to create a genetic formula to help clinicians identify genetic mutations that have the highest and lowest likelihood of causing autism spectrum disorders.

“We think this is a game-changer,” Stephen Scherer, a senior scientist at SickKids and lead author of the study, told CTV News Channel Monday.

“We don’t get to say this very often in science, but this is a significant discovery that changes the way we look at data that we’ve had for a long time.”

Scherer said the research has established a connection between autism and certain genes that are “turned on” in early fetal development.

More importantly, Scherer said, his team has been able to pinpoint small gene segments, called exons, that are activated in the early stages of brain development.

The team identified almost 4,000 such brain exons in more than 1,700 different genes

See also the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail, as well as the Hospital for Sick Children’s press release.

The paper in question is at Nature, here.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bag News Notes comments on the attempts to link Tamerlan Tsarnaev to Canadian jihadi William Plotnikov.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster writes about the search for planets of brown dwarf stars.
• Daniel Drezner writes from Seoul about the challenges and questions facing Korea.
• Two recent noteworthy posts at Geocurrents include one mapping political divisions in Venezuela and another mapping income and growth in India.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s SEK argues that the story of out NBA star Jason Collins will matter inasmuch as people will pour over his differences from his straight twin to try to support their beliefs about sexual orientation (mainly bad beliefs).
• Torontoist reported on the Saturday commemoration of the Battle of York in the War of 1812 and the more contemporary Khalsa Day parade of Sikhs in Toronto.
• The Volokh Conspiracy blogs about the changing demographics of Jews worldwide.
• Window on Eurasia quotes a Russian analysis placing the Tsarnaev brothers in the context of Chechen migrations across Eurasia in the 20th century.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell expands on the thesis expounded in the Guardian comparing the patterns of mistaken belief involved in the theory that vaccines cause autism with the support granted to austerity by economists now.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Discover Magazine blog The Crux argues that rising rates of autism are an artifact of better diagnostics, not of an actual rising prevalence.
• Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell notes how Friedrich von Hayek’s prized capitalism above freedom, famously approving of Chile’s Pinochet.
• Geocurrents describes plans for new canals crossing the Central American isthmus, on the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican border, to supplement the Panama Canal.
• The Global Sociology Blog examines the work of sociologist David Harvey on monopoly rent, noting how capitalism’s imperatives to establish a unified economy are at least troubled by the need to maintain local distinctiveness–brands, neighbourhoods, cities–which offers opponents a chance to challenge the established order.
• Language Hat links (and discusses) the work of linguist William Labov, who managed to define to a remarkable degree the mechanics of language change–who, what, when, where, maybe even why–in a community.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín criticizes the assumptions of Nicholas Kristof in his rescue of sex workers. (Are they really underage? Could this be the best alternative for them? Et cetera.) Diffcult, engagement-worthy stuff.
• Slap Upside the Head notes that a half-baked challenge to New York’s same-sex marriage law based on the mechanics of meetings and whether or not they should be open was rejected. Good.