Brain regions that help people process grammar and remember the sounds of words are less active in children with autism than in controls, according to unpublished results presented Sunday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

Researchers have coaxed human stem cells to develop into simplified mini-brains, with regions resembling discrete brain structures, they reported 19 September in Nature.

Microglia, brain cells that are part of the immune system, are more activated in the brains of young men with autism than in controls, according to an imaging study published 26 November in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Postmortem brains from individuals with autism have abnormal levels of long non-coding RNAs, which regulate the expression of genes, according to a study published 5 September in the Journal of Molecular Neuroscience.

Three new approaches to brain imaging, presented Tuesday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in New Orleans, allow researchers to probe how the brain responds to social situations.

Individuals with autism rely more on words than on facial expressions when interpreting social cues, and this may result from low activity in two brain regions, according to a paper published 22 June in PLoS One.

Among siblings of children with autism, those with better prefrontal cortex functioning — observable as relatively strong executive functions for their age — are better able to compensate for atypicalities in other brain systems early in life, and are therefore less likely to receive a diagnosis of autism later in their development, argues Mark H. Johnson.

Understanding the function of neuronal circuits, specifically microcircuits in the prefrontal cortex and elsewhere in the brain, will play a major role in translating research findings into new autism treatments, says Vikaas Sohal.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have for the first time identified brain regions activated by joint attention, the process in which two people direct their attention to the same object, person or topic of conversation. The findings appeared 16 April in Human Brain Mapping.

Two new postmortem studies show that microglia, which protect the brain from invaders, are denser and more concentrated around neurons in the brains of individuals with autism than in those of controls.