This weekend, the students of the University of Chicago are putting together a local edition of the renowned TED conference called TEDxUChicago. The theme, “Reinventing the Life of the Mind,” nicely blends the goals of TED and the University, the idea-sharing mission of the conference sutured to the intellectual spirit of our campus. Among the talks taking place at the Reynolds Club this Sunday are a few UChicago scientists: paleontologist and educator Paul Sereno (speaking on the topic of “Art In Science”), psychologist and child language expert Susan Goldin-Meadow (”What Our Hands Can Tell Us About Our Minds”), and student speaking contest winner Bruno Cabral (“The Life of the Mind Lived Through Noise”), an undergraduate working in the laboratory of psychologist Howard Nusbaum. Other speakers include Mark Inglis, the first double amputee to climb Mount Everest, Jonathan Greenblatt, the former CEO of GOOD magazine, and cybernetics expert Kevin Warwick giving probably the talk with the coolest title: “The Last Remaining Hurdles to Cyborg Technology.” Tickets are still for sale on the TEDxUChicago website, but if you can’t make it down to Hyde Park, the talks will be webcast live at the UChicago Facebook page.
The Rules of Language
Last week, the Joseph P. Kennedy Intellectual and Developmental Diabetes Research Center held a symposium called “Variations in Language Learning,” a series of talks about how languages are acquired by children, adults, and cultures. Elissa Newport, a professor of brain & cognitive sciences and linguistics at the University of Rochester, presented fascinating data on the concept of “statistical learning,” the theory that the brain uses mathematical tricks to learn the arcane rules of a new language. To test this idea, Newport and her colleagues played a made-up language of nonsense syllables for 20 minutes (!) to volunteers, showing that combinations of syllables that show up more frequently (such as “dutaba” or “babupu”) are eventually perceived as “words” by the listener. The researchers also went on to show that children are better at this “statistical learning” than adults when confronted with a new language, offering an explanation for why languages are easier to pick up when learned at a younger age.
The idea of a universal foundation for learning and developing language echoes the “universal grammar” theories of Noam Chomsky and others, if peripherally so - Newport’s experiments showing that the same statistical learning can be used for tones and visual sequences implies that it’s a universal learning mechanism, not specific to language. But a new phylogenetic analysis of the world’s languages appearing in Nature this week argues against innate rules for language, demonstrating deep grammatical differences between “families” of languages go against the idea of a universal human grammar. Most linguists seem skeptical or underwhelmed about the result, and the debate smacks of a false dichotomy, with the truth about language development less a battle between cognition and culture than a combination of the two forces. Discover, the LA Times’ Amina Khan, and Ars Technica’s John Timmer all weigh in on the study.
Yesterday wasn’t just St. Patrick’s Day for fourth-year medical students around the country - it was also Match Day, the tense and celebratory day when aspiring doctors learn the residency program where they will spend their next 3-7 years. At the Pritzker School of Medicine, green-clad students and supporters absolutely packed the hospital’s Billings Auditorium for the big event Thursday morning, cheering their peers as they were called one by one at random to collect their match envelope. In a local tradition, it literally pays to go last, as students throw into an informal prize pot for whoever has to wait and squirm the longest to pick up their envelope (second-to-last gets a Hershey bar as consolation). In the video below, you can see some of that process - including the outcry when the last envelopes are miscounted - followed by the amazing tension-release of the countdown and unison envelope opening.
The numbers from the day are just as exciting as the video. At Pritzker (recently ranked #12 among medical schools by US News and World Report), 110 students were matched in 24 specialties at 46 institutions, including 23 students who will stay with us here at the Medical Center. The most popular specialties for Pritzker students were internal medicine (25% of the class), general surgery (11%), and pediatrics (11%). Nationally, trends continued to shift for the second consecutive year toward primary care specialties such as internal medicine, family medicine, and pediatrics, according to the National Residency Matching Program, a step in the right direction to meet some of the increased demand for primary care doctors expected in the wake of health care reform. MedPageToday’s Kristina Fiore breaks down the numbers.
Podcast 0.3: Transplants, Rock-Paper-Scissors Ecology, and More
We have settled on a name for our young research podcast: Bench to Bedside. However, we are still keeping the training wheels on as we work out the technical kinks and explore the best ways to deliver audio versions of our latest research and medical stories. Please enjoy the third installment of our podcast, featuring a recent coast-to-coast kidney transplant chain that involved the Medical Center, how Rock-Paper-Scissors can explain biodiversity, the fight against indoor air pollution in Nigeria, and the new numbers on the eating disorders epidemic in the United States. As always, we would love to hear feedback on what we’re doing right and wrong at robert.mitchum@uchospitals.edu or dianna.douglas@uchospitals.edu.
Some people keep ant farms, some people keep multiple flasks of bacteria growing for 13 years (and counting) to study evolution. Ed Yong writes about experiments from Michigan State University that show “tortoise” bacteria can beat out “hare” bacteria over the long run. (And if you’re a science communicator of any sort, do listen to Ed and Carl Zimmer’s “Death to Obfuscation” session from January’s Science Online meeting)
Welcome to pilot episode 2 of our Medical Center research news podcast. We’re keeping the water wings on for now as we continue to refine the format and discover all the technical struggles inherent in podcasting, but please do listen and give us feedback on how we’re doing - and if you have good ideas for a name.
In this episode, we talk to J. Martin Leland about the Stay in the Game event and preventing injuries for baseball, golf, and tennis season. Dianna Douglas reports on the oldest patient to ever receive Whipple surgery at the University of Chicago Medical Center, talking with Kevin Roggin and William Dale about the procedure. And Rob Mitchum reports from a news conference held last weekend by Sen. Dick Durbin about the impact of potential cuts to the National Institutes of Health budget currently being debated in Congress. Thanks for listening!
We are pleased to announce a new way to keep up with research news from the University of Chicago Medical Center, in the form of a regular audio podcast. Because we are all about evolution at ScienceLife, we will start by posting the pilot episode - Episode #0, if you will - and asking for help in shaping the podcast’s development. For starters, the podcast needs a name; if you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments or e-mail us at robert.mitchum@uchospitals.edu and/or dianna.douglas@uchospitals.edu. We would also love to hear what you want in a University of Chicago Medical Center podcast: more research news, patient stories, Q&As with doctors and scientists, or other segment ideas. Whether you’re in your car, in your office, or on the treadmill, enjoy listening to our debut effort!
In the pilot episode of the podcast to be named later, hear from Dianna Douglas and Rob Mitchum about the inaugural symposium of the new Sleep, Metabolism, and Health Center (SMAHC), a study of sexuality in female cancer survivors, and the identification of new targets in celiac disease.
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