The genomics company 23andMe has retracted a statement made on the profiles of some users with Ashkenazi heritage that they may be descended from an extinct tribe from the Caucasus known as the Khazars, inadvertently wading into a political-genetic debate with far-reaching implications for Jewish identity and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The company said in a…
Israel is becoming a center of American medical marijuana production and research, as U.S. companies move their grow houses and R&D operations to the Jewish State. It is much easier to conduct medical trials on drugs made from cannabis in Israel than it is in the U.S., where companies must spend several years getting approval…
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…
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