She canvassed experts, called up cancer centers, and spent hours doing research online, 38 she learned about immunotherapy, a new approach to cancer that oncologists are calling the most promising in decades—and probably ever. Veronica read of an ongoing Duke University trial of a drug called pembrolizumab that is approved and used to treat melanoma and was showing early promise against cancers in other parts of the body too. It’s the same drug that just a few months later would send former President Jimmy Carter’s melanoma, which had spread to his brain, into remission seemingly overnight. In August 2015, Mike learned he’d been accepted into a trial for that same drug. In principle, immunotherapy is simple.

        It’s a way to trigger the immune system’s ability to seek out and destroy invaders. That’s how the body fights off bacteria and viruses. But it doesn’t do that with cancer, which occurs when healthy cells ＿39＿ to outsmart those built-in defenses. That’s where immunotherapy comes in. “Instead of using ＿40＿ forces, like a scalpel or radiation beams, it takes advantage of the body’s own natural immune reaction against cancer,” says Dr. Steven Rosenberg, an immunotherapy pioneer and chief of surgery and head of tumor immunology at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). These strategies don’t target cancer itself but work on the body’s ability to fight it. These therapies, administered in pill or IV form, trigger the immune system to fight cancer cells while keeping healthy cells intact. For someone as frail as Mike, that was an especially appealing prospect.

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        Repeated reading is a pedagogy originally developed to improve first-language (L1) learners’ reading deficiency problems, in particular issues related to reading fluency and comprehension. In a typical repeated reading session, students are led to attend to both the phonological and visual information of a text by listening to the oral reading of the teacher while the students are comprehending the text. In repeated reading of the same text, unfamiliar vocabulary or grammatical structure is revisited in context. This listening-while-reading technique, according to the dual- modality input theories, can significantly enhance the depth of language learning and foster elaborate memory traces of unfamiliar language forms (such as sound and spelling). In addition, repeated reading of the same text, according to Bill VanPatten’s input processing principle, could endow second language (L2) learners with an optimal processing environment for language forms. Specifically, Bill VanPatten stipulated that there exists a universal tendency for bilinguals to process (language) input mainly for meaning. However, if L2 learners only process language input for meaning without attending to language forms, they will never acquire any new words or novel grammatical structures. VanPatten also noted that L2 learners may attend to unfamiliar or novel language forms, and acquire them if and only after they understand the message(s) that the forms encode. This sequential view of input processing account suggests that in initial reading of a text, it is extremely difficult for L2 learners to perform any form-based processing of new vocabulary or grammar. This suggests that any one-shot pedagogical reading teaching practice cannot effectively serve as the fulcrum for promoting L2 acquisition； only later (in the following exposure to the same text) are readers’ attentional resources freed up for analyzing unfamiliar or novel language forms in comprehensible contexts. The above account offers a possible theoretical foundation for repeated reading.

        It is important to note that repeated reading pedagogy involves rereading the same text several times and that such a repetitive exposure may dampen learners’ motivation to attend to the language forms. Stephan Krashen (2004), a famous linguist, proposed that optimal form-based processing of novel vocabulary or grammar only occurs when learners are led to read several comprehensible texts revolving around the same topic, and, ideally, texts constructed by the same author. In reading texts of the above nature, readers are led to familiarize themselves with the writing style and expression of a given author while accumulating the background knowledge (meaning) of the topic at focus. Thus, in each subsequent reading, the readers’ background knowledge is enhanced； importantly, readers are given a contextually- and conceptually-constrained context to revisit the form and usage of unfamiliar vocabulary or grammar. Krashen coined the above approach “narrow reading”, which involves deep reading in a given topic. Narrow reading thus diverges from repeated reading in terms of ‘the context’ in which the target vocabulary or structure is (re)visited: same passage vs. different but related passages.        Apparently, the major and clearest advantage of narrow reading is that it is, in comparison with repeated reading of the same text, potentially more motivating from the perspective of learners’ reading experience. Krashen even goes so far as to claim that narrow reading—the combination of contextualized deep reading and guided phonological reading—really has a chance of leading learners to go beyond “reading for meaning” and to further achieve “reading for learning.” Granted, whether narrow input is unambiguously effective in all cases warrants further empirical validation. I optimistically believe that the positive effects of the narrow reading approach can be expected.

        With every whiff you take as you walk by a bakery, a cloud of chemicals comes swirling up your nose. Identifying the smell as freshly baked bread is a complicated process. But, compared to the other senses, the sense of smell was often underappreciated. Recently, scientists studying olfaction have shed new light on how our sense of smell works and provided compelling evidence that it’s more sophisticated than previously thought.

        In a recent survey of 7,000 young people around the world, about half of those between the age of 16 and 30 said that they would rather lose their sense of smell than give up access to technology like laptops or cell phones. So, what do we know about the sense of smell? 

 The Nose Knows

        Smell begins at the back of nose, where millions of sensory neurons lie in a strip of tissue called the olfactory epithelium. The tips of these cells contain proteins called receptors that bind odor molecules. The receptors are like locks and the keys to open these locks are the odor molecules that float past, explains Leslie Vosshall, a scientist who studies olfaction at Rockefeller University. 

        People have about 450 different types of olfactory receptors. Each receptor can be activated by many different odor molecules, and each odor molecule can activate several different types of receptors. However, the forces that bind receptors and odor molecules can vary greatly in strength, so that some interactions are better “fits” than others.

       “Think of a lock that can be opened by 10 different keys. Two of the keys are a perfect fit and open the door easily. The other eight don’t fit as well, and it takes more jiggling to get the door open,” explains Vosshall.

      The complexity of receptors and their interactions with odor molecules are what allow us to detect a wide variety of smells. And what we think of as a single smell is actually a combination of many odor molecules acting on a variety of receptors, creating an intricate neural code that we can identify as the scent of a rose or freshly-cut grass. 

 Odors in the Brain

       This neural code begins with the nose’s sensory neurons. Once an odor molecule binds to a receptor, it initiates an electrical signal that travels from the sensory neurons to the olfactory bulb, a structure at the base of the forebrain that relays the signal to other brain areas for additional processing. 

       One of these areas is the piriform cortex, a collection of neurons located just behind the olfactory bulb that works to identify the smell. Smell information also goes to the thalamus, a structure that serves as a relay station for all of the sensory information coming into the brain. The thalamus transmits some of this smell information to the orbitofrontal cortex, where it can then be integrated with taste information. What we often attribute to the sense of taste is actually the result of this sensory integration.

       “The olfactory system is critical when we’re appreciating the foods and beverages we consume,” says Monell Chemical Senses Center scientist Charles Wysocki. This coupling of smell and taste explains why foods seem lackluster with a head cold.

       You’ve probably experienced that a scent can also conjure up emotions and even specific memories, like when a whiff of cologne at a department store reminds you of your favorite uncle who wears the same scent. This happens because the thalamus sends smell information to the hippocampus and amygdala, key brain regions involved in learning and memory. 

 A Better Smeller 

       Although scientists used to think that the human nose could identify about 10,000 different smells, Vosshall and her colleagues have recently shown that people can identify far more scents. Starting with 128 different odor molecules, they made random mixtures of 10, 20, and 30 odor molecules, so many that the smell produced was unrecognizable to participants. The researchers then presented people with three vials, two of which contained identical mixtures while the third contained a different concoction, and asked them to pick out the smell that didn’t belong. Predictably, the more overlap there was between two types of mixtures, the harder they were to tell apart. After calculating how many of the mixtures the majority of people could tell apart, the researchers were able to predict how people would fare if presented with every possible mixture that could be created from the 128 different odor molecules. They used this data to estimate that the average person can detect at least one trillion different smells, a far cry from the previous estimate of 10,000. The one trillion is probably an underestimation of the true number of smells we can detect, said Vosshall, because there are far more than 128 different types of odor molecules in the world. 

        No longer should humans be considered poor smellers. In fact, many recent studies have shown that our noses can outperform our eyes and ears, which can discriminate between several million colors and about half a million tones.