Crain’s list of Chicago’s largest hospitals returns with the top five hospitals in the same positions as last year, while the hospital systems list retains its same top three rankings from the prior year.

“These discoveries suggest the importance of considering sex as a biological variable in human genetics and genomics studies,” said project leader Barbara Stranger, an associate professor of pharmacology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. The researchers analyzed 44 types of healthy human tissue from 838 people to find out if there were differences between women and men in the average amount of gene expression.

As part of a new study to show how music can heal the brain, Clara Takarabe plays her viola virtually for patients who have suffered brain injury or stroke at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

“It may be a statistical blip, it may be because the treatment is getting better, or it may be because the patients have been getting younger,” said Dr. Sadiya Khan, an epidemiologist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Most of the dead thus far have been the elderly and the infirm, but hundreds of new cases in recent weeks have been students who contracted the virus after returning to classes on college campuses.