In Israeli author Etgar Keret’s short story collection “Fly Already,” a goldfish exits his bowl, puts on a pair of slippers and tunes into CNN. Of course it’s fanciful, but in real-life Israel, goldfish are already learning to drive – sort of. A team of researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have trained fish…
The key to understanding the universe scientifically is questioning everything you think you know — which also happens to be one of the fundamental tenets of Judaism. That’s the conclusion Chanda Prescod-Weinstein reaches with her book, “The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.” Describing her work as living “at the…
Did Jesus love dates? We may never know, but a BBC documentary short asks the question, spurred by the fruit of the Methuselah date tree, which was germinated from an ancient seed found dried in the food storage at Masada. Judean dates were apparently a renowned delicacy in the time of Jesus, and perhaps he…
After working from home for over a year, I still have no idea how Zoom backgrounds work, which means the various strangers I interview can look past me to see my ailing succulents, unopened prestige cookbooks and a childhood’s worth of participation trophies. Unlike me, a supposed “digital native,” Martin Cooper is old enough that…
Deatra Cohen was studying to become an herbalist when her teacher assigned what seemed like a straightforward task: researching and reporting on the herbal cures and practices of her own culture. But the project was anything but simple. A retired librarian, Cohen was adept at navigating databases and combing through archives. But she could find…
As a kid growing up in Knoxville, Tenn., there was a brief moment after Miriam Kramer saw the Hale-Bopp comet when she decided she wanted to be an astronomer. “I was like, man, that seems like a really cool job: Being able to look at stuff in the sky,” she said. “What an amazing job…
Harvard's Avi Loeb is leading a $100 million project called the Breakthrough Listen Initiative.
I am no longer shocked when I receive an email with a photo of my face super-imposed on an image of crematoria; like many other Jewish writers, and many other women journalists, disgusting harassment is the norm. But now, it’s scientists who are becoming a primary target; a chilling new article in The Boston Globe…
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