Science, Medicine, & Education

Israel farms its Negev Desert — for fish!

By Jeffrey F. Barken/JNS.org At a time when ocean fish populations are threatened worldwide, Israeli fish farmers are developing innovative new technologies and breeding methods that are revolutionizing their industry. Faced with managing scarce water resources in a desert ecosystem, the Israeli government has supported the solutions of kibbutzim—and more recently, those of “Dagim,” the

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Science, Medicine, & Education

German circumcision ban shows Jew-hatred back in fashion

Laws and a culture of guilt about the legacy of the Nazis have kept expressions of Jew-hatred on the margins of German society. But with judges and doctors and others openly attacking Judaism, it’s apparent Germans are increasingly undeterred by such factors. By Jonathan S. Tobin/JNS.org When a court in Cologne, Germany ruled in June

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Science, Medicine, & Education

Pediatricians find benefits of circumcision outweigh risks

By Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel CHULA VISTA, California — The anti-circumcision advocates are probably not happy about the latest news to come out of a study conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which reveal the health benefits deriving from male circumcision far outweigh the risks. According to the report, researchers formed a task force

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Michael Leo Samuel-Rabbi, Science, Medicine, & Education

Argentina has most psychiatrists per capita and chief psychiatrist Andres Rascovsky is Jewish

  By Danny Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan– When the local English-language newspaper in Taiwan printed a story the other day datelined “Buenos Aires, Argentina” and focused on an Argentinian psychoanalyst named Andres Rascovsky, I just knew I had to send an email to the good doctor and ask him a few questions, Buenos Aires being

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Science, Medicine, & Education

Can animals improve their natural vocabularies?

By David Brin ENCINITAS, California — A recent, fascinating recent study is Decoding Animal Languages, by Con Slobodchikoff.  At one level, it is an inspiring demonstration of how new technologies can liberate us from preconceptions and open new avenues of empathy, helping humans to understand the other species who co-inhabit this planet with us. As

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Science, Medicine, & Education

UC policies unhelpful to those fighting anti-Semitism

By Bruce Kesler ENCINITAS, California —Many of the finest and most honest minds – conservative and liberal — in and out of academia have argued, and sometimes succeeded, that campus speech codes often cross the line to suppression of First Amendment freedom of speech. The excesses in the wording of such codes, their arbitrary and

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Science, Medicine, & Education

Einstein at the crossroads of science and religion

Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion by Steven Gimbel; Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland;  ISBN 978-1-4214-0554-4 ©2012, $24.95, p. 245, including endnotes, bibliography, and index By Fred Reiss, Ed.D. WINCHESTER, California — In 1922, a year after winning the Nobel Prize in physics for what we know today as

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Fred Reiss, EdD, Science, Medicine, & Education

Science reaches Frankenstein moment: the creation of new life

By David Brin ENCINITAS, California — Remember where you were when you heard or read about this. It’s important.  In a breakthrough effort for computational biology, the world’s first complete computer model of an organism has been completed, Stanford researchers reported last week in the journal Cell. A team used data from more than 900

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Science, Medicine, & Education

A college by any other name is … a controversy

By Ira Sharkansky JERUSALEM — Moshe Silman is still in intensive care, at least four copycats have failed to immolate themselves alongside banks or government offices thanks to alert bystanders, politicians are accusing one another of being too soft on the Haredim or being too stubborn about one or another detail of what to do

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Ira Sharkansky, Science, Medicine, & Education