● The Scientists: A Family Romance By Marco Roth Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 208 pages, $23 Marco Roth’s childhood was privileged, pampered and precocious. He entertained guests in his family’s duplex on Central Park West by playing the violin and reciting Jean de La Fontaine’s fables in French. Twice a week he visited his psychotherapist….
Belgium will bestow its highest civilian honor on Daniel Zajfman, an Israeli physicist and president of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Zajfman, who was born in Brussels and immigrated to Israel in 1979, will receive the title of Commander of the Order of Leopold on Nov. 4 in a small ceremony at the Embassy of…
Must a great scientist also be a mensch? The historian of science, Silvan Schweber, who teaches at Harvard and Brandeis, has offered some ideal examples in such previous books as “Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius” from Harvard University Press and “In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of…
There has been recent news of a curious quirk of the Apple iPhone 4s. If you have one of these phones you can ask Siri, its anthropomorphized virtual assistant, a question and “she” will give you an answer in her robotic voice. Where’s the nearest Thai restaurant? Siri knows. What’s the weather today? Siri will…
You know that scene in “Back to the Future 2” when Michael J. Fox’s character Marty McFly skates on a hover board? It’s no longer just movie magic. Tel Aviv University scientists demonstrated quantum levitation at the Association of Science-Technology Centers annual conference held last week at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore. The researchers…
May was a good month for the Cedar family. On the heels of Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar’s winning the best screenplay award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival for his film “Footnote,” about Hebrew University Talmud scholar rivals who are father and son, it was announced on May 31st that his father, real-life Hebrew University…
Apparently, there’s no need for Israel to loosen up. So say the results of a psychological and cultural study published on May 27 in the journal Science looking closely at 33 different countries in an effort to better understand cultural differences, and consequently foster better cross-cultural communication and cooperation. A large international team of scientists…
Spacing out was encouraged at this year’s Limmud FSU, an annual cultural and education festival for Russian speakers in Israel. That’s because the history-making guest speaker was Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space when he exited the Voshod 2 ship for 12 minutes in 1965. According to eJewishPhilanthropy, Leonov’s visit to the…
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