This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A strand of DNA is a lot like computer software; it’s the blueprint for the complex computations that cells perform, and like a coding error in a computer program, a single mutation—either a deletion, insertion, or duplication—to the strand can cause cells to malfunction. But DNA doesn’t…
Talk about photogenic: A group of Israeli scientists has engineered a way to read hidden writing on 2,500-year-old pottery shards using a modified digital camera. The shards, which date to the First Temple period, were discovered in the 1960s near the Dead Sea. They were once pored over by scholars looking for still-visible words and…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — People who smile at others are perceived as being older, not younger, than those with a neutral expression, a Ben-Gurion University of the Negev study found. The findings were published in the May 8 edition of Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. In a series of experiments intended to gauge age perception based on facial…
“Climate change is real. Science is real. Facts are real. Just believing hard enough does not turn an article of faith into reality.” The radio display on the dashboard said 100.3 FM but that could not possibly be correct. The guest continued telling the morning program hosts, “We could solve the real problem of climate…
While a new Israeli-owned bakery in San Francisco has customers who keep kosher jumping for joy at its offerings, another recently opened Israeli-owned bakery is making a different subset of those with restricted diets quite happy. Its name is Glütless, and it serves the gluten-free. A long overdue diagnosis of celiac disease propelled Golan Yona…
(JTA) — Physicist Mildred Dresselhaus, the daughter of impoverished Polish Jewish immigrants whose pioneering research into the thermal and electrical properties of carbon earned her the nickname “Queen of Carbon,” died February 20. She was 86. Dresselhaus’ research was foundational to the field called nanoscience, in which matter is manipulated at an atomic and molecular level. Her pioneering work earned…
BOSTON — Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg donated $50 million to Boston’s Museum of Science, crediting his hometown institution with sparking his intellectual curiosity. The contribution, announced Tuesday, is the single largest in the museum’s history and will fund an endowment to support the institution’s education division that is now named the William and…
The semi-serious data-driven magazine Improbable Research has released a study empirically assessing (with tongue firmly in cheek) just how famous Donald Trump is. The verdict? He’s bigger than Jesus. In “Measuring Fame Quantitatively V: Who’s the Most Famous of Them All (Part 2),” Dr. Eric Schulman, an astrophysicist and science humorist, used Google searches and…
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