November 29, 2001
Newsmakers
LANGUAGE LEARNING: The co-director of the UW’s Center for Mind, Brain and Learning says that babies learn to distinguish sounds made in their native language from sounds in other languages long before they learn to speak. Patricia K. Kuhl recently told the Baltimore Sun that infants respond to sounds in very sophisticated ways. “My studies show that by the age of 6 months, infants raised in Sweden respond in a special way to the sounds of Swedish, and do not respond in that way to the sounds of English. The studies show that infants’ brains learn sound patterns even though they don’t know what the sound patterns mean.”
SOOT SUSPICIONS CONFIRMED: Tests that compare the toxicity of air particles near industrial plants when the plants are running and when they are shut down has confirmed that polution is higher when they’re running, according to a UW professor. Jane Koenig, a professor of environmental health, recently told The New York Times that an Environmental Protection Agency test near a Utah steel mill bolstered the findings of a study done in the 1980s. “The answer is really very, very clear – that the epidemiology was right all along, as most people have been saying,” she told the Times.
BURNED BACK TO LIFE: A National Park Service decision in 1988 to let fires burn in some of the wild areas of Yellowstone National Park was controversial to say the least. But scientists today are pointing to the park’s rebirth as proof that officials made the right decision. “In many senses, for many organisms and ecosystems, the fire was a shot in the arm,” the UW’s Jerry Franklin told a San Jose Mercury News reporter. “It really refreshed the landscape. Obviously, it’s a different park than it was before, but it still has the same components.” Franklin is a forest resources professor.
FACE-OFF: In a question and answer session with the Washington Post, the UW’s Jonathan Bricker, a doctoral candidate in psychology, said travelers need to conquer the fears of flying that are more prevalent today than prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. “Face your fears and realize (that a crash) is unlikely to happen. Flying is safe. It’s safer to fly – even today – than to drive on the freeways. Ask yourself if it’s worth giving up all the planning and potential for pleasure of a vacation on account of fear. If we put this in perspective for a moment, if you were scheduled to fly on Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States, the chance that you would have died in this terrorist attack was one in 6,000. On average, the chance of dying in a crash is one in 10,000,000.”
INVASION OF THE PLANTS: Foreign plants and animals continue to invade the United States and the ultimate result could be increased food prices and tax bills, a UW biologist recently told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. “Our landscape has been forever altered,” said Sarah Reichard, an assistant professor in forest resources. “With new shipping technologies, faster transportation and the globalization of trade, invasive organisms are moving around faster than ever before.”
Newsmakers is a periodic column reporting on coverage of the University of Washington by national press services.
