The power of words

What’s the shape of a word? How do you save a dying language? How is studying languages a science anyway?

All excellent questions for our guest Prof. David Adger a linguist at Queen Mary University of London. He is interested in what underlies the patterns found in the grammar of human languages.

Why would anyone study this? As David states, just to better understand the world. But there are also more practical applications like saving dying, often Indigenous languages which hold within them stories and knowledge that can help everyone’s understanding of the world.

Season 7ScientistsIncMarch 12, 2020Naked Coffee Roasters - Spitalfields Marketscience, scicomm, #2scis, linguistics, modeling, language, wordsComment

The protein folding biologist: Marie Kondo of the cell

Part I of our Stanford Special.

Dr. João Rodrigues decided early on that as much as he loved biology, he didn’t want to get his hands too dirty, so now he studies the shapes that proteins make by using computer models. He works with biologists and chemists to look at the way the proteins in our cells go from being like beaded necklaces to more complex structures to help them do what they need to do.

Season 6ScientistsIncFebruary 20, 2019Stanford universityscience, scicomm, podcast, #2scis, biology, biochemistry, modeling, computational, protein, folding Comment