A Sampling of Clips for 
April 27, 2006

* UCSD faculty and staff may obtain a copy of an article by e-mailing the University Communications Office

Songbirds May Be Able to Learn Grammar
ABC News, April 27 -- The simplest grammar, long thought to be one of the skills that separate man from beast, can be taught to a common songbird, new research suggests. Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature. It took UCSD psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language. Yet what they learned may shake up the field of linguistics. More

Similar stories in:

Washington Post
Forbes
Boston Globe
San Diego Union-Tribune
Zee News (India)

(And many more, national and international)

Mystery Disturbance Traced to Sound Wave
San Diego Union-Tribune, April 27 -- A group of local scientists has uncovered some clues to the source of a mysterious disturbance that rattled San Diego County on the morning of April 4, shaking windows, doors and bookcases from the coast to the mountains. The scientists, based at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, say the disturbance was caused by a sound wave that started over the ocean and petered out over the Imperial County desert. (Quotes Peter Shearer, a Scripps professor involved in the research.) More

County Awards UCSD
Medical Center $ 9 Million Inmate Contract
North County Times, April 26 -- County supervisors Tuesday voted unanimously to award a $9 million, one-year contract -- with five additional "option" years for a potential total $61.2 million -- to the UCSD Medical Center to provide health care services to county inmates. Officials from the San Diego County Sheriff's Department said Tuesday that the contract was not formally put out to bid -- mainly because local hospitals seemed disinterested. More

Althea Technologies Wins
UCSD Athena Corporate Pinnacle Award
San Diego Daily Transcript, April 27 -- Althea Technologies Inc. (News), a San Diego company that provides technologies and services for pharmaceutical development and manufacturing, announced Thursday that the company received the 8th annual UCSD Athena Corporate Pinnacle Award from a select group of distinguished nominees. More

Editorial: Paying the Price
San Diego Union-Tribune, April 27 -- Despite all the brain power among University of California administrators, not one thought of the first recommendation of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers audit of UC pay practices: a checklist to track compliance with pay rules for university officials' compensation. The lack of so simple a way to control compensation suggests UC officials didn't want the Board of Regents and the public to see the routine breaches of pay rules and policies. (Mentions UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox.) More

Theory Predicts Nanotechnology
Enabled DNA Sequencing Model
NanotechWire, April 26 -- A paper published in the journal Nano Letters describes a method to sequence a human genome in a matter of hours, at a potentially low cost, by measuring the electrical perturbations generated by a single strand of DNA as it passes through a nanopore. “Current DNA sequencing methods are too slow and expensive for it to be realistic to sequence people’s genomes to tailor medical treatments for each individual,” said Massimiliano Di Ventra, Ph.D., of UCSD, who directed the project. “The practical implementation of our approach could make the dream of personalizing medicine according to a person’s unique genetic makeup a reality.” More