Four articles this month and it’s a pretty mixed bag. The most controversial article of the bunch is one that links autism with wealth, but the one drawing a link between human intelligence and disease rates in different countries comes a close second. Then, there’s the highly speculative paper that offers a new model of the universe that abandons the familiar Big Bang. Finally, just for fun, there’s one article talking about a cheap and effective way of deterring thieves from stealing your car.

Autism, disease of the rich?

The precise causes of autism is as yet unclear and it doesn’t help matters that there’s a major anti-intellectual movement that attempts to link the disease to vaccination. This post on Neuroskeptic points out that autism appears to be more common in rich countries than poor ones, which is odd, but might be explained by the fact that many cases of autism in poor countries might simply be undiagnosed. A new paper however attempts to correct for this ascertainment bias and it discovered that not only were incidences of autism more common in richer countries, they were also more common among richer people in rich countries, independent of ethnicity.

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