While this article doesn't specifically relate to language, I thought it would provide for an interesting comparison article. The topic of discussion was a Swedish initiative that will spend $350 million in Systems Biology. This is considered an unprecedented amount of money in any particular field, and will prove to be very beneficial to pharmaceutical innovation if successful.
The reason why I chose to talk about this article is because biological systems are much like languages. They both have very organic processes in the respect that they change over time, they choose the most popular/successful characteristics to carry on, and they play very specific roles or functions in whatever they do. Another correlating factor is that they both are extremely different in composition and makeup within different organisms (or languages), yet they usually act cohesively and have some underlying characteristics that are similar or the same.
Overall, it was an interesting article to read and I think the same approach that we are taking to studying biology could probably be cross-applied to languages. When we sequenced the genome, we weren't looking for anything in particular, we were just trying to gather information. It seems the best way to take the next step in psychology/linguistics, we should gather as much information about every language, and then do analysis on them.
Original Article: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/front/detail/Swiss_spend_heavily_to_learn_language_of_life.html?siteSect=105&sid=8500233&cKey=1196888442000&ty=st
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