Mars exploration has followed a long and bumpy interplanetary road. There have been 38 separate missions to Mars, and more than half have failed. The latest mission — the Phoenix lander — marks the 39th journey. Here, highlights of these Earthly attempts to film, circle and touch the cold Red Planet.
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But parents and pediatricians of some children with autism maintain that their children developed normally in the first two years of life ― making eye contact, waving goodbye, even saying a few words. Then these children seemed to abruptly lose these skills.
This ‘autistic regression’, reported in about one-third of children with the disorder, is baffling researchers.
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The clip stars a younger Klin, with larger glasses but the same easy smile, vying for the attention of a young girl with autism. His face inches from hers, he speaks in a warm, animated voice. But the girl never looks from the toy blocks in her hands. Suddenly, she spots an orange M&M in the far corner of the room and scoots after it.
These interactions, though frequent, always affect the extroverted psychologist. “When you walk into a room with a young child and you feel that sense of absence ― that you are not being processed, that you are not having any impact ― it’s quite striking,” he says.
Klin came to Yale in 1989 to study autism. A decade ago, he recruited Warren Jones, then a soft-spoken 22-year-old sculptor and mechanical engineer who had taught art to children with autism.
Together, Klin and his protégé have developed a series of revolutionary eye-tracking experiments to directly measure these visual perceptions, beginning in infancy. “If we truly want to understand what’s going on in their minds, we need to truly visualize the world through their eyes,” Klin says. “And that’s a bit of a work of art.”
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