Autism Breakthrough: Girl's Writings Explain Her Behavior and Feelings

Carly Fleischmann has severe autism and is unable to speak a word. But thanks to years of expensive and intensive therapy, this 13-year-old has made a remarkable breakthrough.

Two years ago, working with pictures and symbols on a computer keyboard, she started typing and spelling out words. The computer became her voice.

"All of a sudden these words started to pour out of her, and it was an exciting moment because we didn't realize she had all these words," said speech pathologist Barbara Nash. "It was one of those moments in my career that I'll never forget."

Then Carly began opening up, describing what it was like to have autism and why she makes odd noises or why she hits herself.

"It feels like my legs are on first and a million ants are crawling up my arms," Carly said through the computer.

Carly writes about her frustrations with her siblings, how she understands their jokes and asks when can she go on a date.

"We were stunned," Carly's father Arthur Fleischmann said. "We realized inside was an articulate, intelligent, emotive person that we had never met. This was unbelievable because it opened up a whole new way of looking at her." This is what Carly wants people to know about autism.

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Breakthrough: Autistic Teen Finds Voice

"It is hard to be autistic because no one understands me. People look at me and assume I am dumb because I can't talk or I act differently than them. I think people get scared with things that look or seem different than them." "Laypeople would have assumed she was mentally retarded or cognitively impaired. Even professionals labelled her as moderately to severely cognitively impaired. In the old days you would say mentally retarded, which means low IQ and low promise and low potential," Arthur Fleischman said.

Therapists say the key lesson from Carly's story is for families to never give up and to be ever creative in helping children with autism find their voice.

"If we had done what so many people told us to do years ago, we wouldn't have the child we have today. We would have written her off. We would have assumed the worst. We would have never seen how she could write these things —

how articulate she is, how intelligent she is," the grateful father added.

"I asked Carly to come to my work to talk to speech pathologists and other therapists about autism," said Nash. "What would you like to tell them? She wrote, 'I would tell them never to give up on the children that they work with.' That kind of summed it up."

Carly had another message for people who don't understand autism.

"Autism is hard because you want to act one way, but you can't always do that. It's sad that sometimes people don't know that sometimes I can't stop myself and they get mad at me. If I could tell people one thing about autism it would be that I don't want to be this way. But I am, so don't be mad. Be understanding."

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20 Facts About the Human Genome

• The genome is the complete list of coded instructions needed to make a person.
• The 4 letters in the DNA alphabet - A, C, G and T - are used to carry the instructions for making all organisms. The order (or sequence) of these letters holds the code just like the order of letters that makes words mean something. Each set of three letters corresponds to a single amino acid.
• There are 20 different building blocks - amino acids - used in a bewildering array of combinations to produce our proteins. The different combinations make proteins as different as keratin in hair and haemoglobin in blood.
• The information would fill a stack of paperback books 200 feet high.
• The information would fill two hundred 500-page telephone directories.
• Between humans, our DNA differs by only 0.2%, or 1 in 500 bases (letters). (This takes into account that human cells have two copies of the genome.)
• If we recited the genome at one letter per second for 24 hours a day it would take a century to recite the book of life.
• If two different people started reciting their individual books at a rate of one letter per second, it would take nearly eight and a half minutes (500 seconds) before they reached a difference.
• A typist typing at 60 words per minute (around 360 letters) for 8 hours a day would take around 50 years to type the book of life.
• Our DNA is 98% identical to that of chimpanzees.
• The estimated number of genes in both humans and mice is 60,000-100,000; in the round worm (C. elegans), the number is approximately 19,000; in yeast (S. cerevisiae) there are around 6,000 genes; and the microbe responsible for tuberculosis has around 4,000.
• The vast majority of DNA in the human genome - 97% - has no known function.
• The first chromosome to be completely decoded was chromosome 22 at the Sanger Centre (now the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) in Cambridgeshire, in December 1999.
• There is 6 feet of DNA in each of our cells packed into a structure only 0.0004 inches across (it would easily fit on the head of a pin).
• There are 3 billion (3,000,000,000) letters in the DNA code in every cell in your body.
• There are 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000) cells in the body.
• If all the DNA in the human body was put end to end it would reach to the sun and back over 600 times (100 trillion x 6 feet divided by 93 million miles = 1200).
• 12,000 letters of DNA are decoded by the Human Genome Project every second.
• If all three billion letters were spread out 1mm apart they would extend 3,000 km or about 7,000 times the height of the Empire State Building.
• If all three billion letters were spread out 3mm apart they would extend 9,000km more than twice the length of the Mississippi river at 3,779km.

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The Dark Side of Light

The model of vortex structure in laser speckle. Open vortex lines are in red, while closed vortex loops are in white. Credit: O’Holleran, et al.

Light may not seem very interesting in our everyday lives. But to scientists, light’s properties are a constant source of intrigue. The nature of light as both wave and particle, light as the universal speed limit, and the way light interacts with magnetic fields in the atmosphere to form auroras are a just a few examples of light’s fascinating behavior.
Recently, researchers from the University of Glasgow and the University of Bristol in the UK have discovered another unusual property of light – or, more accurately, the darkness within light. As the researchers explain, natural light fields are threaded by lines of darkness, which create optical vortices that appear as black points within the light. The group has modeled this phenomenon, and found that the lines of darkness exhibit fractal properties with Brownian (random) characteristics. Further, the characteristics of these optical vortices suggest universal properties, which could help connect different areas of physics.
Many people have noticed the phenomenon of laser speckle, which occurs when coherent, monochromatic laser light bounces off a rough surface, giving the surface a speckled appearance. The black specks are interference patterns generated by a superposition of highly coherent light waves reflected from different points on the rough surface. Sometimes the speckled pattern can even appear to sparkle when the viewer moves relative to the surface.

In a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, the UK researchers describe how they developed a model of the superpositions that create the dark optical vortices, using numerical simulations and experiments. In their experiments, they created laser speckle with a 10-mm-diameter helium neon laser beam shining through a screen made of ground glass.

By measuring the superpositions with an interferometer, the scientists could generate a 3D map of the structure of the optical vortices. They found two types of vortices. Infinite vortex lines, which account for about 73% of the dark vortices, percolate entirely through the light beam. The remaining 27% of the vortices form closed loops, which occur when a vortex line returns to its starting point within a small enough area.
When investigating the lines of darkness further, the researchers found that they exhibit scale invariance. In other words, the vortices look the same no matter how much you zoom out – they are fractals. Lead author Kevin O’Holleran of the University of Glasgow said that, while he and his colleagues suspected vortex lines to exhibit fractal properties, they were quite surprised to find that the fractality was of a Brownian nature.

“To find that the vortex lines in light have Brownian characteristics is exciting,” O’Holleran told PhysOrg.com. “Brownian structures are inherently random, so the coherence of our model was in no way limiting the fractal behavior of the vortex lines. We are looking forward to exploring these properties in more detail. More specifically, we hope to investigate the topological side of random light fields, such as how often vortex lines are knotted or linked.”

Interestingly, the researchers noted that these properties of optical vortices (the ratio of vortex lines to loops and their scale invariance) are very similar to the properties of cosmic strings, according to the cosmic string lattice model. The model describes the configuration of cosmic strings in the early universe – the very thin but very dense one-dimensional defects in space-time that could be responsible for the formation of galaxies.

The researchers don’t think this similarity is likely to be coincidental. They suggest that these properties could be universal for all optical fields, and they plan to investigate the analogy further.

“The greatest significance [of this study] is the connection to other fields in physics,” O’Holleran said. “Universal properties connect fields of research at deeper levels than the exact formulation of each system. Shared fundamental properties or restrictions (like how lines can be embedded in 3D space) result in universal exponents appearing in varied and apparently disconnected fields of research. The fact that vortex lines in light exhibit power laws suggesting universal properties means that these lines are governed by more general laws than wave equations.”

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