Belmonte had set up a website explaining the project and the game, called Astropolis, in which children act as pilots of their own spaceships. The site attracted a lot of online traffic. “We figured it would only be a matter of time before we heard from Google,” he says, joking.
Chris Cronin, the business strategist who contacted Belmonte, had a vested interest in autism: He was part of a team working on SketchUp, Google’s three-dimensional drafting software intended for architects and professional designers.
Soon after SketchUp’s release, Cronin and fellow Colorado-based business developer Tom Wyman began hearing from users that children with autism love using the software. “You hear it once, and it’s a heartwarming story. Hear it twice, and it’s a coincidence. Hear it three times, and you think, ‘Gosh, there must be something going on here’,” Wyman says.
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Scientists have for the first time found direct evidence that defects in a particular type of brain receptor sometimes give rise to autism, according to research published 24 November in Molecular Psychiatry.
Using new genetic screening technology, a few research groups are finding that a surprisingly large number of children with autism — at least five percent — have an underlying problem with their mitochondria, the energy factories of the cell.
