Grand Roundup: Top posts for the week of Sept. 30

The five most-read stories on Scope this week were:

Stanford’s Brian Kobilka wins 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: This week, Brian Kobilka, MD, professor and chair of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Robert Lefkowitz, MD, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Duke University, were named winners of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Nobel Prize-netting iPS-cell discovery was initially a tough sell (for me, anyway): Scope contributor Bruce Goldman recalls the first time he learned about the groundbreaking research of Shinya Yamanaka, PhD, MD. On Monday, Yamanaka was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine, alongside John Gurdon, D.Phil, for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.

Combining online learning and the Socratic method to reinvent medical school courses: A piece published in the latest issue of Inside Stanford Medicine takes a closer look at the efforts of a core group of Stanford professors, education technology specialists and collaborators from the Khan Academy to develop a new online learning initiative to reinvent medical school courses.

Using the “flipped classroom” model to re-imagine medical education: In this video, Stanford’s Charles Prober, MD, senior associate dean for medical education, and medical school colleagues discuss replacing the traditional lecture format with the “flipped classroom” model to make better use of the fixed amount of educational time available to train doctors.

Stanford psychologist partners with ‘30 Rock’ actor on the ‘The Lutz Experiment’: Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, PhD, is collaborating with comedian John Lutz, who plays a sketch writer on the popular TV series “30 Rock,” on a new book project tentatively titled “The Lutz Experiment.”