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Purpose of review: Autism is a biologically based disorder of brain development. Genetic factors - mutations, deletions, and copy number variants - are clearly implicated in causation of autism. However, they account for only a small fraction of cases, and do not easily explain key clinical and epidemiological features. This suggests that early environmental exposures also contribute. This review explores this hypothesis. Recent findings: Indirect evidence for an environmental contribution to autism comes from studies demonstrating the sensitivity of the developing brain to external exposures such as lead, ethyl alcohol and methyl mercury. But the most powerful proof-of-concept evidence derives from studies specifically linking autism to exposures in early pregnancy - thalidomide, misoprostol, and valproic acid; maternal rubella infection; and the organophosphate insecticide, chlorpyrifos. There is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism. Summary: Expanded research is needed into environmental causation of autism. Children today are surrounded by thousands of synthetic chemicals. Two hundred of them are neurotoxic in adult humans, and 1000 more in laboratory models. Yet fewer than 20% of high-volume chemicals have been tested for neurodevelopmental toxicity. I propose a targeted discovery strategy focused on suspect chemicals, which combines expanded toxicological screening, neurobiological research and prospective epidemiological studies.

"Regardless of the platform, social media interactions require two-way conversations (see Box 2). Joining one of the many preexisting scientific conversations can simultaneously disseminate your own content, expand your online network, and raise your professional visibility. An easy entry point is the ScienceOnline conglomerate (http://scienceonline.com), an enthusiastic group of science communicators ranging from tenured professors to freelance journalists "

This web page is designed to give everyone an idea of what our universe actually looks like. There are nine main maps on this web page, each one approximately ten times the scale of the previous one. The first map shows the nearest stars and then the other maps slowly expand out until we have reached the scale of the entire visible universe.

Find material relating to your course that is relevant to the things you are interested in. Create and expand your interest network and let Learning Sherpa do the work from there. Easily discover ideas that inspire you for your next essay, project, or research paper that are relevant to you.

"We provide novel evidence for the effects of metabolic dysfunctions on brain function using the rat model of metabolic syndrome induced by high fructose intake. * We describe that the deleterious consequences of unhealthy dietary habits can be partially counteracted by dietary supplementation of n-3 fatty acid. * High sugar consumption impaired cognitive abilities and disrupted insulin signalling by engaging molecules associated with energy metabolism and synaptic plasticity; in turn, the presence of docosahexaenoic acid, an n-3 fatty acid, restored metabolic homeostasis. * These findings expand the concept of metabolic syndrome affecting the brain and provide the mechanistic evidence of how dietary habits can interact to regulate brain functions, which can further alter lifelong susceptibility to the metabolic disorders. "

OCLC Research is one of the world's leading centers devoted exclusively to the challenges facing libraries and archives in a rapidly changing information technology environment. Our mission is to expand knowledge that advances OCLC's public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing library costs. Since 1978, we have carried out research and made technological advances that enhance the value of library services and improve the productivity of librarians and library users.

Standards for Web Content Interoperability The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. OAI has its roots in the open access and institutional repository movements. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. Over time, however, the work of OAI has expanded to promote broad access to digital resources for eScholarship, eLearning, and eScience.

The book is about networked science: the use of online tools to transform the way science is done. In the book I make the case that networked science has the potential to dramatically speed up the rate of scientific discovery, not just in one field, but across all of science. Furthermore, it won't just speed up discovery, but will actually amplify our collective intelligence, expanding the range of scientific problems which can be attacked at all. But, as I explain in the book, there are cultural obstacles that are blocking networked science from achieving its full potential. And so the book is also a manifesto, arguing that networked science must be open science if it is to realize its potential. Making the change to open science is a big challenge. In my opinion it's one of the biggest challenges our society faces, one that requires action on many fronts. One of those fronts is to make sure that everyone - including scientists, but also grant agencies, governments, libraries, and, especially, the general public -- understands how important the stakes are, and how urgent is the need for change.

SciVerse offers unprecedented access to a constantly expanding universe of content and solutions resulting inmore discovery with less searching.

Through this website, we will continue, unify, and expand NASA's open source activities. The site will serve to surface existing projects, provide a forum for discussing projects and processes, and guide internal and external groups in open development, release, and contribution.

The Tetherless World Constellation (TWC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) explores the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, to enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and develops new technologies and languages that expand the capabilities of the Web under three themes: Future Web, Xinformatics and Semantic Foundations.

Tetherless World Constellation (TWC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) explores the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, to enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and develops new technologies and languages that expand the capabilities of the Web under three themes: Future Web, Xinformatics and Semantic Foundations.

Ai Research is a leading artificial intelligence research project. At Ai, we're creating a new form of life. Our expanding web site is an essential part of the emerging global discussion about artificial intelligence. On this website, we showcase the state of the art in pattern-matching conversational machines, demonstrated by Alan, and in reinforcement learning algorithms, demonstrated by HAL. Use our forums, original papers, online labs, demos and links to explore what's happening both at Ai (the project) and in AI (the field).

"And again, in this expanded group, she found the same association between the variation of the DRD4 gene and a willingness to take risks on the slopes. The variant's overall effect was slight, explaining only about 3 percent of the difference in behavior between risk takers and the risk averse, but was statistically significant and remained intact"

"Cellendes continously expands the 3-D Life product line to provide an innovative and increasingly comprehensive technology for a broad range of applications in 3-D cell culture. Cellendes seeks collaborations with academic and industrial partners to explore and develop the use of the 3-D Life technology in complex cell-based assays and tissue models for drug screening as well as in biomedical engineering. Cellendes was founded in 2009 by Dr. Brigitte Angres and Dr. Helmut Wurst. Cellendes is a spinoff company of the NMI Natural and Medical Sciences Institute at the University of Tübingen."

In our Universe, a black hole is bounded by a spherical surface called an event horizon. Whereas in ordinary three-dimensional space it takes a two-dimensional object (a surface) to create a boundary inside a black hole, in the bulk universe the event horizon of a 4D black hole would be a 3D object - a shape called a hypersphere. When Afshordi's team modelled the death of a 4D star, they found that the ejected material would form a 3D brane surrounding that 3D event horizon, and slowly expand. The authors postulate that the 3D Universe we live in might be just such a brane - and that we detect the brane's growth as cosmic expansion. "Astronomers measured that expansion and extrapolated back that the Universe must have begun with a Big Bang - but that is just a mirage," says Afshordi.

A proposed experiment using ground-based telescopes, called BigBOSS, may be the most cost-effective way to study and measure the phenomenon called dark energy, which appears to be causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.

The spacetime symmetries we discussed in the previous post can be expanded to include three discrete symmetries: parity, charge conjugation, and time-reversal. It turns out (rather surprisingly) that physics chooses not to obey these symmetries, and this act of rebellion allowed the universe to develop interesting things like galaxies and life.

Using entire galaxies as lenses to look at other galaxies, researchers have a newly precise way to measure the size and age of the universe and how rapidly it is expanding, on a par with other techniques. The measurement determines a value for the Hubble constant, which indicates the size of the universe, and confirms the age of the universe as 13.75 billion years old, within 170 million years. The results also confirm the strength of dark energy, responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe.

The Internet has become not only a tool for disseminating knowledge through scientific publications, but it also has the potential to shape scientific research through expanding the field of metaknowledge - the study of knowledge itself, according to an article published by University of Chicago researchers in the journal Science.