Hindsight is 2020: The year in review

Recent articles

top-down view of the mouse brain

2020 in research images

Feast your eyes on glowing glia and organoids; high-resolution, digital renditions of mouse brains; fluorescent beads passing through zebrafish guts and more.

By Spectrum
23 December 2020 | 2 min read
researcher facing off with the coronavirus.

Rewind: Spectrum’s best from 2020

Our staff picks the stories, podcasts and special reports that stood out from the rest this past year.

By Spectrum
23 December 2020 | 5 min read
Lab scene during COVID 19 pandemic.

Inside the reporter’s notebook: Dispatches from 2020

Spectrum's staff couldn't report on the ground this year — with no lab visits, sit-down interviews or in-person conferences to attend — but we observed a lot of changes from our computer screens.

By Spectrum
23 December 2020 | 4 min read
Micrograph of nerve cells being targeted by CRISPR enzyme to activate the silenced gene in Angelman syndrome

Hot topics in autism research, 2020

The Spectrum team highlights five topics that distinguished autism research in 2020: diversity in data, gene therapies, subtyping, social circuitry and the ‘autism gene’ debate.

By Spectrum
23 December 2020 | 8 min read
White lab mouse sitting in a gloved hand.

Notable papers in autism research, 2020

Gene therapies and the factors influencing autism traits top Spectrum’s list of the 10 most notable research findings we covered in 2020.

By Spectrum
23 December 2020 | 4 min read

Explore more from The Transmitter

Brain organoid.

What is the future of organoid and assembloid regulation?

Four experts weigh in on how to establish ethical guardrails for research on the 3D neuron clusters as these models become ever more complex.

By Claudia López Lloreda
10 December 2025 | 7 min read
Research image of variants of the ATPase subunit PSMC5/RPT6.

Insights on suicidality and autism; and more

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 8 December.

By Jill Adams
9 December 2025 | 2 min read
A stack of papers topped by many paper shreddings against a red background.

Exclusive: Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications that trained neural networks on ‘bonkers’ dataset

The dataset contains images of children’s faces downloaded from websites about autism, which sparked concerns at Springer Nature about consent and reliability.

By Calli McMurray
8 December 2025 | 5 min read

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