By Caroline Stauffer

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Genetically modified corn seeds are no longer protecting Brazilian farmers from voracious tropical bugs, increasing costs as producers turn to pesticides, a farm group said on Monday.

Producers want four major manufacturers of so-called BT corn seeds to reimburse them for the cost of spraying up to three coats of pesticides this year, said Ricardo Tomczyk, president of Aprosoja farm lobby in Mato Grosso state.

Adults with autism face a greater risk of sexual victimization than their typically-developing peers, researchers say, and a lack of education could be part of the reason why.

In a survey of adults with and without autism, 78 percent of those on the spectrum reported at least one instance of sexual victimization compared to less than half of their typically-developing peers.

People with autism were more than twice as likely to say that had been raped and over three times as likely to report unwanted sexual contact, according to findings published in the September issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Programmes teaching “mindfulness” and “positive psychology” helped mothers of children with autism to reduce their stress and depression, according to new study.

Most services for such families focus on the disabled child, researchers say, but improving the mental health of parents is likely to make them better caregivers and that, in turn, could improve their child’s development.

“There are literally decades of studies that have described the high levels of stress and distress, anxiety and depressive symptoms that mums and dads of children with developmental disabilities suffer, and I didn’t want to describe anymore, I wanted to do something about it,” says Elizabeth Dykens, who led the new study.

“So this is really for parents - it was for their mental health and well-being, for their own adult development,” says Dykens, an associate director of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development in Nashville, Tennessee.

“And I think that’s what really sets it apart from the traditional interventions that are much more child oriented,” she says.

"Scientists discover people with autism have too many brain 'connections'," the Mail Online reports. US research suggests that people with an autistic spectrum disorder have an excessive amount of neural connections inside their brain.

The headline is based on the results of a study that found that at post-mortem, brains of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have more nerve cell structures called “dendritic spines” – which receive signals from other nerve cells – than the brains of people without ASD.

Brain development after birth involves both the formation of new connections and the elimination or "pruning" of other connections. The researchers concluded that people with ASD have a developmental defect in the pruning/elimination of dendritic spines.

Further examination of the brains of people with ASD found that more of the signalling protein mTOR was found to be in its activated state than in brains of people without ASD.

A process called autophagy, where older structures and proteins within cells are removed and broken down, was also impaired.

The researchers performed further experiments to show the mTOR signalling inhibits autophagy, and without autophagy pruning of dendritic spines does not occur.

KATHMANDU, NEPAL -- The walls of a small, brightly lit room are decorated with colorful musical instruments. A guitar is stored in one corner of the room. In another, a keyboard lies on the floor. A table against the wall holds a flute and two traditional Nepalese drums, a tabla and a madal.

Maulik Bhandari, 7, slowly steps into the room, looking down at his feet and gripping his mothers hand. He shows no interest in the instruments or the man seated on a stool in the room.

But when the man begins to strum the guitar, Mauliks eyes light up. He instantly lets go of his mothers hand and moves toward the man.

Maulik is beginning his daily music therapy session at the day care center run by AutismCare Nepal, the first organization to provide music therapy for people with autism, in Kathmandu, Nepals capital.

Within a few minutes, Maulik is singing his favorite English nursery rhyme, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. He keeps up with the melody and enunciates the occasional word. Moving in rhythm with the music, he points skyward whenever the song mentions the star.

Mauliks mother, Alina Bhandari, 33, takes him to the day care center each day, traveling by bus for more than an hour from their home in Lalitpur, a district adjoining Kathmandu district.

Before he began therapy in April 2013, Maulik used to hit people, Bhandari says. He could not sit still or communicate basic needs such as asking for food when he was hungry.

But from the time he began music therapy, Maulik has followed what is said to him and communicates his basic needs. Although he still does not speak in full sentences, he started using single words to communicate last January, Bhandari says.

During the second and third trimester of pregnancy, the outer layer of the embryo's brain, the cortex, assembles itself into six distinct layers. But in autism, according to new research, this organization goes awry—marring parts of the brain associated with the abilities often impaired in the disorder, such as social skills and language development.

Eric Courchesne, director of the Autism Center of Excellence at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues uncovered this developmental misstep in a small study that compared 11 brains of children with autism who died at ages two through 15 with 11 brains of kids who died without the diagnosis. The study employed a sophisticated genetic technique that looked for signatures of the activity of 25 genes in brain slices taken from the front of the brain—an area called the prefrontal cortex—as well as from the occipital cortex at the back of the brain and the temporal cortex near the temple.