NOC (pronounced No-see), the beluga whale that was recently reported to have imitated human speech, has some stiff competition. An Asian elephant named Koshik can produce several recognizable Korean words, researchers report today in Current Biology — the same journal that described NOC’s dalliances with speech.

Whereas the whale’s utterances resembled a freestyle kazoo jam more than actual language, Koshik seems to be imitating genuine Korean words. When 16 native speakers listened to recordings of the captive elephant, many could make out the same words his trainer’s recognized: “annyong” (hello), “anja” (sit down), “aniya” (no), “nuo” (lie down), and “choah” (good). More than half of the volunteers recognized Koshik’s “annyong” greeting, while most confused “choah” for similar sounding words such as “boah” (look) and “moa” (collect).

On the basis of these findings, Angela Stoeger and W. Tecumseh Fitch, of the University of Vienna, and their team think that Koshik is better at matching vowels than consonants because he can accurately imitate the frequencies required to create different vowels. To do this, Koshik shortens and changes the shape of the long elephant vocal tract — which typically creates low-pitch sounds — by placing his trunk inside his mouth.

Stoeger’s team are not sure why Koshik started imitating human speech, which his trainers first noticed in 2004 around the time the elephant reached sexual maturity at the age of 14. Koshik lived without other elephants between 1995 and 2002, while being regularly exposed to spoken Korean. Deprived of kin during a period in which elephants forge relationships, Koshik may have begun imitating humans instead, Stoeger’s team speculate. “The social circumstances under which Koshik’s speech imitations developed suggest that one function of vocal learning might be to cement social bonds and, in unusual cases, social bonds across species,” they write.

Video courtesy of Stoeger et al., Current Biology

The Nobel Committee awarded this year’s prize in Physiology or Medicine to John Gurdon, of the University of Cambridge, UK, and Shinya Yamanka, of the University of Kyoto, Japan, for “for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent”, this morning in Stockholm.

Working with frog eggs, Gurdon showed that the nucleus from a mature cell could be transplanted into an egg cell with its nucleus removed and produce a living frog. The technique, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, is often called cloning and it was used to produce Dolly the sheep. His work revolutionized the understanding of developmental biology and cell fate, showing that a genome contains all the information needed to transform a cell into a whole organism.

Yamanaka, on the other hand, showed that whole mammalian adult cells could be reverted into an embryonic-like state by treating them with a cocktail of protein factors. These induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are similar to embryonic stem cells that give rise to every tissue in the body. He achieved the feat first in mouse cells, and later with human cells. It is hoped that iPSC cells, transformed into myriad cell types, will be useful for regenerative medicine and drug testing.

A group led by James Thomson, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was also among those to report the first human iPSCs in 2007.

According to Google Scholar, Yamanaka’s 2006 publication describing mouse iPSCs has been cited more than 6,000 times, and his report on human iPSCs has garnered nearly 4,000 5,000 citations.

UPDATE – full story here.

Images courtesy Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, and University of California, San Francisco.