Pollyanna is glad to be back with you

Pollyanna wants to wish all her US friends and readers a happy Fourth of July and a happy Canada Day to those north of the border. Enjoy your holiday weekends. Drive carefully and avoid firecrackers.

For starters, let us refer you to the Miriam Shlesinger Human Rights action blog. As the weeks and months go by without Miriam, we continue to realize what we have lost. She got us into the human rights struggle. Please act on behalf of people who are so much in need of support in their trials and tribulations at the hands of oppressive regimes and corporations.


IN MEMORIAM 
Pollyanna grieves for the 19 firefighters who lost their lives fighting the forest fire in Arizona.It is very sad that such people who devote their lives to serving the community and protecting people fall victim to the forces against which they are struggling. These "Hot Shots" are the bravest of the brave.

Nineteen crosses and American flags adorn the fence outside of Station in Prescott, Arizona. Photograph: Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Pollyanna also notes with sadness the death of Sarah Guyard-Guillot, who fell 15 meters to her death during a performance of Ka by the Cirque de Soleil in Las Vegas.

Sarah Guyard-Guillot, left, in a previous performance of Ka. Photograph: Leila Navidi/AP

 The circumstances are now under investigation, but it would appear that she accidentally slipped her safety wire while being lifted. She was a mother of two children. Guyard-Guillot had been with the original cast of Ka since 2006, and had been an acrobatic performer for more than 20 years. It is a most tragic event.



HAPPY BIRTHDAY YOUR HOLINESS 
 
Pollyanna wishes His Holiness the Dalai Lama all the best on the occasion of his 78th birthday. He is one of the true holy people in this world. We had the privilege of meeting him and speaking to him on one of his visits to Israel. Truly he is a great man. May he be blessed with long life and success in helping his oppressed people in Tibet.

FREEDOM AT LAST 
You will recall the story of the Christian girl in Pakistan who was falsely accused of desecrating a Koran and held in prison.

Rimsha and her family received death threats and were forced into hiding

Pollyanna is pleased to learn that after living in hiding for several months, the family is now safe, somewhere in Canada. Rimsha is learning English and adjusting to her new environment. We wish her well and wish even more that countries like Pakistan would repeal their harsh blasphemy laws that are totally inconsistent with the democratic values that we believe should dominate the modern world. Alas, the chance for that are vanishingly small.

LION CUB RESCUE 
This incident in which a lioness rescued her cub from a life-threatening situation was sent to us by several sources and is booming around the Web. It is heartwarming and nice to see.


PEDANTRY?
Stephen Fry gives us his take on snobbishness in language. We are not sure that we agree with him totally. Modern Hebrew as spoken on the street is sloppy and a pain to our pedantic ears. The English we see written and hear over the media is not much better if at all. As Pooh-Ba says "pardon us if we decline.." Maybe we are snobs or just old whatevers.

TIDBITS FROM SCIENCE

CENTENNIAL OF QUANTUM PHYSICS 
Recently we celebrated the centennial of Pollyanna's arrival on Earth. This year also marks a century since Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, published his first papers on quantum theory. In the years that have passed since then quantum mechanics has made great strides and certainly the initial work of Bohr cannot be called the cutting edge. Even though the technical details of Bohr’s model turned out to be wrong, he had grasped the essential idea for understanding atoms: abandoning common sense in favor of the crazy rules of quantum theory. Bohr saw more deeply than others of his time that embracing quantum physics was the key to unlocking nature’s hidden truths. While quantum confusions drove other physicists to despair, Bohr pursued the path into the quantum world. He foresaw the role of entanglement and his famous debates with Einstein moved physics along towards the promised land. One of the most best-known exchanges of this discussion was Einstein's famous quote that "God does not play dice with the universe," to which Bohr is said to have replied, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do!" (The debate was cordial, if spirited. In a 1920 letter, Einstein said to Bohr, "Not often in life has a human being caused me such joy by his mere presence as you did.")

HOPE FOR DIABETICS 
Pollyanna is happy to learn that a technique known as 'reverse vaccination' has passed some tests with humans and appears to be a means of curing type I diabetes. It suppresses the immune reaction that kills insulin producing cells. The researchers designed a molecule that contained the gene for making proinsulin, the precursor to insulin. The molecule also included instructions for triggering the killer cells' response and then shutting it down. It worked in mice and now has worked in humans. It looks promising indeed.

TRAFFIC ON MARS
The Opportunity rover on Mars has set a new record for travel off world. This is not in itself of major importance, but it is in general exciting that the robot vehicles on the surface of Mars, Opportunity and Curiosity,  are providing precious scientific information.


 The Holy Grail of course is to find evidence of past life on Mars. The vehicles also show, in our opinion, the great advantage of robots over human flight and activity in space. We refer you to the Curiosity page for fascinating images and results.

FARE FORWARD VOYAGER 
Elsewhere in the Solar System our old Voyager friends (with whom we worked during the planetary phase of the mission) are moving onwards.. Both of the spacecraft are forging ahead to leave the Solar System as defined by the extent of the heliosphere and are moving on to be first man-made objects in interstellar space. All of us are thrilled by this prospect and the new scientific knowledge that will come our way. You might  wish to track them with this real time odometer provided by NASA.

BOOK REVIEW 
We have not had a book review for a while. One of our favorite authors, Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan: 'tricksy'. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

 has come out with a Cold War retrospective spy novel, Sweet Tooth, reviewed in the Guardian by Justin Cartwright. It is not the usual cloak and dagger thriller and is said to contain surprises and twists. May well be worth your time. The title should not put off those who are waiting for the diabetes cure mentioned above.

SILLY TIME

What If? is as usual a good introduction to silly time. It asks what would happen if you dropped 3,000 bouncy balls from a seventh floor window onto a passerby. This reminds us of Avenue Q, a musical that we saw last year in New York. In the story, a penny is dropped from the top of the Empire State Building and causes grievous harm to a character in the play. Of course, because of the viscosity of air, a penny that has little mass and a relatively large surface area would not be going very fast at the surface, but for art we suspend our critical faculties.

3D TELEVISION CAME AND WENT 
We were never offered the option of 3D television and frankly we never cared for movies that required special glasses. We note that it is now phasing out and the only fan left is our dear little Cynthia.



GRADUATE SCHOOL DAYS
There is a long-running Web comic called Ph.D for Piled Higher and Deeper that chronicles the trials and tribulations of graduate students. We enjoy it and indeed are nostalgic only for the youth of graduate school years and not for the stress and uncertainty in which we lived. Here is an example:




The site itself is worth a visit for anyone who has ever been a graduate student or who has ever supervised one. It is written and drawn by Jorge Cham.

For many years we were one of the faculty members charged with teaching graduate students at Tel Aviv University to write scientific papers in English. Since only people competent in English were accepted to our course (required of all whose dissertations were to be evaluated abroad), the problem was just inability to write in any language. We attribute that to the failure of the education system to impart such basic skills. The following saga tells the tale:






 

Pollyanna says Hi

Pollyanna is back and hopes you have all recovered from the last tirade from Titan. She will  try to be as nice as she can. Judy sent us a quote that seems to describe our situation in the world and in our little part of it:"they told me to cheer up, things will only get worse. I cheered and they did." Thank you for the optimism Judy.   Let us have some empathy for a dying star.
When a star reaches the end of its life cycle it can shuffle off this mortal coil in a variety of ways, which depend inter alia on its mass. The big guys explode as novae or supernovae whereas the smaller ones fade out. The Very Large Telescope in Chile has caught the death throes of an old star that is fading out by means of a planetary nebula. It is giving off a bright green sheen that will go on for about 10,000 years. The color indicates that the object has a high abundance of oxygen.

A glowing bubble of gas, called a planetary nebula, surrounds a dying old star located 3,300 light-years away in this image captured by the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Courtesy of the European Southern Observatory

Pollyanna along with Titan and YandA send Happy Birthday greetings to our grandson Ari who turned 14 today.

Ari

For starters, let us refer you to the Miriam Shlesinger Human Rights action blog. As the weeks and months go by without Miriam, we continue to realize what we have lost. She got us into the human rights struggle. Please act on behalf of people who are so much in need of support in their trials and tribulations at the hands of oppressive regimes and corporations.

MYSOGENY IN PAKISTAN 
Not everything that Pollyanna tells you has to do with pleasant things. On matters involving women and girls she is just as much a ranter as Titan. Again we see attacks against women and girls designed to prevent them from obtaining education and empowerment in society. This seems to be inherent in male-dominated religions in particular fundamentalist Islam. Women suffer discrimination in other faiths, but only in Islam does it reach the level of murder. In the city of Quetta in Pakistan, the violence started on Saturday when a bomb exploded on a bus carrying students to Sardar Bahadur Khan Women's University. When survivors were brought to a medical center, suspected suicide bombers stormed the building and started shooting indiscriminately. In total 25 people were killed in the two attacks. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni Muslim militant group blamed for a string of sectarian and high-profile terror attacks, has claimed responsibility for this attack. Pollyanna is outraged as you should be as well.  

People in the Pakistani city of Quetta are in shock after Saturday's double attacks. Here, civilians are seen emerging from the hospital which was attacked.

Apropos, the right to education, Pollyanna is pleased that in Israel the Education Ministry will allow the haredi (ultraorthdox) school system four months to reach an understanding with the State regarding core studies – else, the government will impose State school guidelines on the haredi schools, including tests examining schools' efficiency and growth measures (known as Meitzav tests). These religious schools do not teach the basic curriculum i.e. math, science, English etc. that are required of all schools. They are funded by taxpayer money, but prefer to deny their children the skills needed to function in the modern world. Bad as it is for boys, it is even worse for girls. When a Bais Yaakov girls school set up a program for high school diplomas for girls a few years ago, the big shot haredi rabbis went apoplectic. Cheers to IRAC, the legal arm of Reform Judaism in Israel that brought the issue to court.

GENES CANNOT BE PATENTED
Let us move on to happier things. Pollyanna is delighted that the US Supreme Court has ruled that genes cannot be patented.This ruling has broad implications and can help make genetic testing for breast cancer risk cheaper and more available. We quote an expert:“The Supreme Court got it exactly right,” said Eric Lander, the president of the Broad Institute, a genetic research center affiliated with Harvard and M.I.T. “It’s a great decision for patients, it’s a great decision for science, and I think it’s a great decision for the biotechnology industry.”

While most agree with the Court, the Washington Post points out in an editorial that this cannot be the last word on the subject. "Congress must explore how to encourage useful genetic research while allowing the fruits of that inquiry to be used as freely as possible." Indeed things that occur in nature cannot be patented. The editorial makes a silly analogy to Isaac Newton, gravity and the apocryphal falling apple. A more apposite analogy would be to say that while Herz could not have patented electromagnetic waves that he discovered, Marconi could and did patent his radio transmitter and receiver.


A SUPERCELL IN TEXAS
Yosefa passed this on from Phil Plait. A supercell is a form of extreme thunderstorm generated when air masses of different characteristic collide. They can give rise to tornados. Here is a beautiful video of such an entity:



A supercell near Booker, Texas from Mike Olbinski on Vimeo.


WHY WE HATE TO GO TO GYM
Indeed, going to gym and jogging give us great health benefits, yet we all prefer to sit on a couch and watch millionaires exerting themselves on a field or court for our entertainment. Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist, discusses the adaptive value of our physical fitness and why we hate to run. Pollyanna, Titan and their imaginary playmates YandA go to gym faithfully. On Sunday, Y does a treadmill run while A goes to Pilatis core workout with a trainer. Meet Adi

Would you think that beneath that charming exterior there lurks someone who stresses your internal muscles as she smiles? During the week, Y works out with Batya in a group in Kiryat Onno while on Thursday A falls into the hands of one of these two weight trainers--Dana and Shira.

Shira left, Dana right

Certainly we like to go to gym.

Titan keeps himself fit by orbiting Saturn at a neat clip of 5.6 km/s and, despite your impressions from his blog, he has very little eccentricity.  Pollyanna as a young active lass is in fine shape.

CHARITY SUNSHINE TILLMAN-DICK





She has a story that should serve as an inspiration for all of us and Pollyanna is not a purveyor of cliches. This woman is for real. She is an American-born soprano and a recipient of two double lung transplants. Charity has performed across the United States, Europe, and Asia in venues as diverse as the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City; The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; Severance Hall in Cleveland, Ohio; Il Giardino Di Boboli in Florence, Italy; the National Palace of the Arts in Budapest, Hungary; the Tel Aviv Opera House in Israel; the American Embassy in Beijing, China; the United Nations in New York; and National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. She has collaborated and performed with noted conductors and musicians including Eva Marton, Bruno Rigacci, Joela Jones, Marvin Hamlisch, Bono, Zoltan Kocis, Joan Dornemann, and former Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice. Some of her operatic roles have included Titania in A MidSummer’s Night Dream, Gilda in Rigoletto, Violetta in La Traviata, and Ophelia in Ophelia Forever. Charity has also performed for numerous presidents, prime ministers, members of Congress, and world dignitaries.

Her story is wonderful and we are going to link you to her TedMed lecture so you can hear it from her.



VACCINATION FOR HVP WORKS 
Yosefa has called to our attention a study that shows that since the introduction of the vaccine against human papillomavirus in the US, there has been a significant decrease in the incidence of infection with the viral strains that cause cervical cancer. The rate of infection dropped to 3.6% among girls ages 14 to 19 in 2010, from 7.2% in 2006. Pollyanna calls on all of you who have teenage daughters to get them vaccinated pronto.

HELP THE BLIND SEE
Thank you Yosefa for calling Pollyanna's attention to this new development. It should be a major step forward in the enabling and empowerment of blind people.

 
TIDBITS FROM SCIENCE
YES WE HAVE A PARADOX OR AT LEAST AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY
Neils Bohr, a founding father of quantum mechanics once said, "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.".Prof. Bohr would be happy now. There is a rock known as NWA (North West Africa) 7325 that is causing quite a tizzy in the world of meteorite researchers. It has characteristics that indicate that its source was the planet Mercury. The chemistry is convincing to some but not to others. The discussion is most interesting although the issue may never be resolved since a sample return from Mercury does not seem to be in the offing.

Unearthly green rocks (one shown) found in the western Sahara last year may hail from Mercury.

S. Ralew

SOCCER HEADS
We have long suspected that heading a soccer ball countless times will take a toll on the functioning of the player's brain. Indeed, the youth leagues in the US do not allow heading by players under the age of 18. It now has been shown in a recent study that heading the ball, while not causing concussion, can effect subtle changes in the brain that interfere with memory function. We think that the introduction of helmets would help. Helmets encountered resistance among ice hockey professionals, but are now standard. FIFA, are you listening?

ARCHEOLOGY WITH MODERN TECHNOLOGY FINDS LOST ANCIENT CITY
An ancient city over a millennium old has been discovered in Cambodia near the Angkor Wat temple, by means of  LIDAR (light radar) by Australian archeologists. It is an amazing finding. The stunning discovery of the city, Mahendraparvata, includes temples hidden by jungle for centuries - temples that archaeologists believe have never been looted.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/lost-horizons-mediaeval-city-uncovered-20130614-2o9p3.html#ixzz2WrbZY01n

BOOK REVIEW
Before we move on to our silly section, we would like to give you a book review, which we have not done for a while We have read both of Khaled Hosseini’s first two novels, “The Kite Runner” (2003) and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” (2007), and understand well why they spent a combined total of 171 weeks on the bestseller list. His newest book
AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED
Khaled Hosseini
Riverhead. 404 pp. $28.95

received an enthusiastic review from Marcela Valdes, in the Washington Post. We have every intention of reading it.

What if? This week it is for the rowing enthusiasts among us, especially those with exotic tastes.

Pollyanna is a bit amused by complaints that the pace of modern life is destroying the quality of our lives. She thanks xkcd for helping to put this in perspective.

We dedicate this strip to Yosefa who has to put up with similar things in the real world:




FORGET THE OLD BOY NETWORK



DILBERT AND SCIENCE FICTION

Pollyanna will try to be nice this week

 


Last week brother Titan was particularly nasty and he promises to be even worse next week because of the stuff that keeps coming up. Pollyanna sympathizes with him, but will try to do her bit to show that the world is not all bad things.

For example, we had a visitor from the universe

At its closest, the asteroid  passed within a distance of about 6 million kilometres

that flew by at a respectable distance but helped to remind us  that there are dangerous things out there and we should watch them carefully. This one was big., 2.7 km in dimension. It is even massive enough to trap and hold a moon.

We also went to a concert with our grandkids and heard the William Tell Overture which certainly shows that one should have faith, as WT's kid did. 

Of course, some  of us associate the overture with the Lone Ranger radio and TV adventure stories, but it really means being an American of a certain age, not young at all.




OK, enough of being silly and on to serious stuff,

Pollyanna also asks you to click on the Miriam Shlesinger Human Rights action blog and to do your bit for human rights.

Consider the five great mathematicians who made the greatest difference to our lives. Pollyanna knows that to many of you math is anathema and invokes traumatic memories of old school days. Nonetheless, the cell phone you use, the car you drive and the medicine that cures your ills, all are available because of mathematics. In addition, it has a beauty of its own and would be a worthy subject of  research even without its myriad applications in the real world. In a blog post, Suburban Lion proposes introducing advanced  mathematical concepts into school curricula. The idea makes sense.

Something that math and physics can do for us is to give us an idea of the galaxy in which we live. Phil  Plait in Bad Astronomy tells us about new research that explains how our Milky Way galaxy developed its spiral arms and maintains them. It is nice that although we are inside the galaxy, modern observing techniques and powerful computer simulations tell us what the galaxy is like. Pollyanna says we should want to know because we do live here.

A map of our galaxy, including the new measurements of the Local Arm. Click to galactinate.
Illustration by Robert Hurt, IPAC; Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF

WELCOME BACK LITTLE FROGGIE
The Hula Painted Frog, long considered extinct, has been discovered living in the Hula bog. Since it is the sole living member of a family Latonia, which went extinct 15,000 years ago, is has been classified as a living fossil. Its habitat had been nearly destroyed when some idiot decided to drain the Hula swamp in Northern Israel. Reflooding of part of it seems to have helped these tough little survivors.

 

The Hula painted frog was last seen in Israel the 1950s - until it was found again in 2011 by a park ranger

SMART DOG
While we have long regarded our Murphy as the epitome of canine wisdom, it appears that a border collie bitch seems to have figured out grammar, whereas Murphy just knows a few simple commands and is trying to understand why picking up tortoises is not a means of gaining popularity. The collie, Chaser, owned by psychologist John Pilley of Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C. can understand nouns and verbs.  She demonstrated her grasp of the basic elements of grammar by responding correctly to commands such as “to ball take Frisbee” and its reverse, “to Frisbee take ball.” for example. Murphy is most impressed as are we.

A border collie named Chaser participates in an experiment testing her ability to understand commands given before she can see any of the objects named in those directives. After hearing a four-word command, Chaser consistently turned around and carried the correct item from the head of the bed to the living room, where she placed it next the appropriate object. Credit: Courtesy of J. Pilley

CHEERS FOR PEANUT BUTTER
We love crunchy peanut butter and our lady Yosefa makes it for us at home. We are, however, somewhat surprised and quite pleased to learn that the yummy brown stuff has several non-food uses. We call your attention to the list of ten uses of peanut butter provided by our friends at Care2.

PUTTING OUT THE SMOKING LAMP
Throughout the world governments and NGO's have been doing their best to remove the scourge of tobacco smoking that causes untold deaths and illnesses. Now Russia has come on board with a new law banning smoking in public places. In the coming years, the law will be expanded further. In Russia, 400,000 people die each year from tobacco-related diseases and President Putin is be to applauded for his efforts to improve public health. The measure has not been received well by the smoking community, who make up 40% of the
public.



If we judge by experience in Israel, real enforcement will take years. Here, the fining of cafe owners for smoking by guests has been effective. It has, however, taken nearly two decades for the public space to become relatively smoke-free. We wish the Russian clean air addicts good luck in their struggle to breathe again. It will require a major increase in taxes on tobacco products if it is to work. In the US, Starbucks has announced a smoking ban within 25 feet (7.6m) of the entrance of any Starbucks cafe. When the ban on smoking in public went into effect in the EU, an Italian interviewed on BBC radio claimed that this would mark the demise of all intellectual activity in Italy. . He seems to have exaggerated just a bit.

.  WHAT IF is a bit fanciful this week, but amusing.

In winter, we like to check the weather radar to see what is coming our way. It is not, according to XKCD, a good idea to be obsessive about it.  
BUILDING SKYSCRAPERS
Pollyanna has great respect and admiration for the building trades. We all wonder how they function high up, as we see at lunch time during the building of the Empire State Building in New York in 1930.

Sometimes, however, when things get complicated up there on top, the need for the artistic touch becomes apparent:

HOW TO DEAL WITH A MASHER

Here is Pollyanna again

Pollyanna is with you again and would like to open with a suggestion that you take a look at the sky to the Northwest after sunset on the 24th and 25th. There will be a small Olympian convention with Jupiter, Venus and Mercury getting together for a chat and presumably a drink.






Thanks to This Year in Space and Sky and Telescope for the information

For starters, let us refer you to the Miriam Shlesinger Human Rights action blog. As the weeks and months go by without Miriam, we continue to realize what we have lost. She got us into the human rights struggle. Please act on behalf of people who are so much in need of support in their trials and tribulations at the hands of oppressive regimes and corporations.

IN MEMORIAM
This has been a week of much senseless death at the hands of both man and nature.
KILLING OF INNOCENT CHILDREN

Pollyanna weeps for the two little girls who were  murdered in Israel apparently by their father. The mother of the two girls who were murdered on Monday had complained a day earlier to the Arad police, saying she feared her ex-husband would kill her daughters. The police ignored the complaint and did not call the girls’ father in for questioning nor send anyone to the house. On Tuesday the girls, ages three and five, were found strangled in their home in the Bedouin village of Al-Fura’a.

Sisters Asinad, 3, and Ramais, 5, who were found dead in Bedouin town of Al-Fura’a.

One must wonder if racism played a role in the police malfeasance. We are promised that heads will roll.


MORE TO MOURN
Pollyanna mourns the loss of life in the terrible tornado in Oklahoma.  The blows we  sustain from nature are unavoidable, but we must prepare for them as best we can. In the Golan, an Israeli soldier who was working at mine clearing was killed by an explosion of an old mine, despite warnings by the Engineer Corps that these mines were faulty and liable to explode unexpectedly. This amounts to criminal negligence and we hope some lessons will be learned and some careers ended.
MURDER BY MADNESS AND FANATICISM
In Beersheba in Southern Israel a disgruntled bank customer, who had been refused an expanded overdraft, shot and killed four people, including the branch manager, his deputy and two customers before shooting himself. In London, two crazed Muslims attacked a British soldier in the street and hacked him to death with a meat cleaver. A suicide bomber attacked a military base and uranium mine in Niger and killed at least 19 people. This is the tip of the murderous iceberg. Pollyanna is shocked and appalled. There seems to be no end to killing, whether by malice or incompetence. Pollyanna salutes the brave woman, the Cub Scout leader, , Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, who bravely stood up to the killers in London. 



THE WALRUS SAYS WE SHOULD SPEAK OF OTHER THINGS:

GRIFFON VULTURE

Vulture released in Israel with GPS and markings

This majestic bird is one of nature's great scavengers. In recent years it has been threatened with extinction and as a result is now a protected species. In France, its population has increased and it is now accused of being a predator as well as scavenger. It now has attracted attention by the speed with which the body of a woman who had fallen to her death from a mountain was devoured. In less than an hour from her death, nothing was left except bones and clothing. Since farmers are required to burn dead animal carcasses, the birds have no carrion and have become predators on livestock. The incident of the human body may be the trigger to legalize hunting the vultures. In Israel, there are just a few breeding pairs left and major efforts are being made to restore the species. The birds are tracked by GPS devices which caused one poor individual to be taken into custody by the Saudis as an Israeli spy!

Let us move on to happier things and start by welcoming James Levine back to the podium. He conducted a
concert at Carnegie Hall after a long hiatus caused by illness.

Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

James Levine conducted the Met Orchestra on Sunday.

We also find some solace in the joys of science. The comet ISON is arousing much interest and as a sun-grazer it might put on a dazzling show when it reaches its perihelion of 1.17 million kilometers from the surface of the sun on Nov. 28.Because of this extremely close approach, comet ISON holds the "potential" to flare into a dazzling object — possibly becoming bright enough to be briefly glimpsed in broad daylight. On the other hand, we recall comet Kohutek that was supposed to be a Star of Bethlehem in December 1973, but fizzled badly, although it provided rich scientific information to telescope observers.

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of Comet ISON was taken on April 10, 2013, when the comet was slightly closer than Jupiter's orbit at a distance of 386 million miles from the sun (394 million miles from Earth).
CREDIT: NASA, ESA, J.-Y. Li (Planetary Science Institute), and the Hubble Comet ISON Imaging Science Team

View full size image

In other news from astronomy, it appears that the Kepler space telescope mission has come to an end after four years (the designed lifetime) because of hardware failure. While the telescope’s search for planets may be over, researchers’ analysis of the data it collected is not. Kepler data have yielded more than 2,700 likely planets and 132 confirmed ones, with more yet to come as the data are mined. It is disappointing that not all the questions are answered, but we are grateful for what we have obtained.


A BYZANTINE MOSAIC has been found in southern Israel. It is most impressive, 12 by 8.5 meters in size and was obviously the floor of a public building during the Byzantine period, 4th to 6th century C.E.

The mosaic discovered prior to construction of a highway in Israel, was decorated with geometric structures and amphoras, or vessels for holding wine. The amphoras were also decorated, for instance, one was flanked by a pair of peacocks.
CREDIT: Yael Yolovitch, Israel Antiquities Authority

View full size image

NEWS FROM GENETICS 
It is most encouraging that for the first time, scientists have created human embryonic stem cells by transferring the nucleus of a mature cell into an egg.

Enlarge

CLONING FEAT

Using a laser and a tiny needle, researchers suck DNA from a human egg, the first step of a newly revised process that created human embryonic stem cells for the first time.

Courtesy of M. Tachibana

The cloning technique could nudge the dream of personalized medicine closer to reality, researchers suggest May 15 in Cell. These cells can be used for various therapies and can give hope to sufferers from spinal cord injuries and diseases such as diabetes or Parkinson’s. In other news, we are told that the people of Europe are really one big family. DNA data show that everyone living in Europe 1,000 years ago who left any descendants is an ancestor of every European living today. On the other hand, the hypothesis that humanity represents a small population of survivors for a huge volcanic eruption 75,000 years ago has come under further scrutiny and doubt has been raised on both geological and genetic grounds. This is an ongoing investigation, so stay tuned.

TAMING BY GENE ACTIVITY 
A study conducted in Russia over a fifty year period shows that by selective breeding, foxes can become either dog-like, i.e. tame or wolf-like, i.e. more aggressive.

Enlarge

Taming silver foxes (shown) alters their behavior. A new study links those behavior changes to changes in brain chemicals.

Tom Reichner/Shutterstock

 No DNA changes took place, but the activity of certain genes in brains of the animals changed, in particular in the the prefrontal cortex and amygdala. The former is involved in decision making and in controlling social behavior, among other tasks. The latter helps process emotional information. The researchers found that the activity of hundreds of genes in the two brain regions differed between the groups of affable and hostile foxes. This gives a hint about what happened to the brains of wolves on their way to becoming dogs.

CONGRATULATIONS 
Pollyanna sends her mazal tov to Prof. George Daniel Mostow who was awarded the Wolf Prize in mathematics last week for the discovery of the rigidity phenomenon in geometry, known as the strong rigidity theorem.

Wolf Prize laureate Prof. George Daniel Mostow. Photo by David Bachar

Prof. Mostow will turn 90 on July 4, but just took a swim in the Mediterranean. We all salute his great achievements, described by the  prize committee who wrote that "In Mostow's work one finds a stunning display of a variety of mathematical disciplines," and that "few mathematicians can compete with the breadth, depth and originality of his works."

The Wolf Prize is awarded annually in Israel to scientists and artists from abroad, for "achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations among peoples." So far it has been awarded to 272 laureates from 23 countries, for their contributions to agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, physics, architecture, music, painting and sculpture.

What if is amusing this week.  

Those of us who have Ph.D.'s can recall the halcyon days of graduate  school and the terrible shock of getting the longed-for degree and being thrust out into the real world where things have to be done. Of course, you can chose an academic career which is in some ways a continuation of graduate school. Those who like money will turn to jobs in industry. Dilbert encounters such a person and we present the beginning of the relationship.




FINICKY EATERS UNITE!

Pollyanna greets Shavuot

Ruth and Boaz, first date

Pollyanna is with you and gearing up for the Shavuot festival that comes next Wednesday. She is of course asking how our government would deal with Ruth the Moabite lady if she were to show up today.It is traditionally the festival of the bringing of the first fruits to the Temple in ancient times and is also the anniversary of the giving of the Ten Commandments and the Torah in general on Mt. Sinai. It has some nice traditions, such as the Tikkun or study session in the synagogue on the eve of the holiday and eating dairy dishes such as cheeses etc. during the holiday itself. The source of the former is the belief that Heaven opens up and presumably answers to difficult questions are forthcoming. The latter derives from the proximity between  the commandments to celebrate Shavuot and to refrain from cooking a kid in its mothers milk. None of us have ever committed such an atrocity. The prohibition is the base for all our meat/dairy kashrut rules.

Pollyanna also wishes Felice Cinco de Mayo to all our friends who celebrate this day.
 
 It is indeed a worthy celebration of the victory of the Mexican people over the army of Napoleon III who thought that the Civil War in the US would give France an opportunity to carve out an empire in America. We presume that it also helped Franz Josef get rid of a bothersome younger brother  who had been so successful as Duke of Lombardy that he was being touted for higher things.

For starters, let us refer you to the Miriam Shlesinger Human Rights action blog. As the weeks and months go by without Miriam, we continue to realize what we have lost. She got us into the human rights struggle. Please act on behalf of people who are so much in need of support in their trials and tribulations at the hands of oppressive regimes and corporations.

IN MEMORIAM
This week saw the 28th of Iyar in the Hebrew calendar on Wednesday. This is the date of Jerusalem Day, to mark the so-called unification of the city during the Six-Day War in 1967. It is as phoney as the other manufactured holidays since Jerusalem today is one of the world's most segregated cities. It is, however, the date of a real and worthy event, the commemoration of the 4,000 Ethiopian Jews who died en route to Israel. They died of thirst and hunger in the desert and suffered murder, rape and torture at the hands of the Sudanese.We join the Ethiopian community in honoring their memory. May they rest in peace.


Pollyanna also notes with sadness the death of Mary Thom in a motorcycle accident.
 










Ms Thom was one of the founders of the Women's Media Center and a long time editor of Ms magazine. She made major contributions to feminist journalism and to the empowerment of women. She will be sorely missed by the community that she served for so long and with such devotion.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY 
Pete Seeger, one of our iconic figures, turned 94 this week. We wish him many happy returns of the day. He is a great singer and a political leader whose integrity cost him dearly in the McCarthy era. He led the opposition to the Vietnam war and stood at the head of countless left-liberal causes. We have long admired him and wish him continued life and health. We offer you a song that he composed with Joe Hickerson, Where have all the flowers gone? It is nice to see him singing with Arlo, the son of his old friend and colleague Woody Gurthrie.



SMOKING BANS AND THEIR BENEFITS
The banning of smoking in the public space has yielded many benefits such as reduction of asthma hospitalizations and premature births. The latter is evidenced in a new study from  Belgium. While it does not show a direct cause-effect connection, the stats are convincing. A team of researchers, lead by Dr Tim Nawrot from Hasselt University, investigated whether recent smoking bans in Belgium were followed by changes in the frequency of preterm delivery. In Belgium, smoke-free legislation was implemented in three phases (in public places and most workplaces in January 2006, in restaurants in January 2007, and in bars serving food in January 2010). The researchers analyzed 606,877 live, single-born babies delivered at 24-44 weeks of gestation in Flanders from 2002 to 2011. Preterm birth was defined as birth before 37 weeks. A dramatic fall in premature births  was also seen in Scotland with the implementation of clean indoor air laws.

They found reductions in the risk of preterm birth after the introduction of each phase of the smoking ban. No decreasing trend was evident in the years or months before the bans. Pollyanna thinks that deniers of second-hand smoke effects should be confined in the smoke-filled enclosures found in airports together with climate change deniers.

Time trend in rate of spontaneous preterm deliveries (with 95% confidence interval) in Flanders,
2002–11, with vertical lines indicating stepwise implementation of smoke-free legislation

Apropos maternity, Save the Children has come out with its annual report on maternity and child deaths. Babies in Somalia have the highest risk of dying on their birth day. First-day death rates are almost as high in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, and Sierra Leone. Mothers in these four countries are also at high risk on this day. Mothers in Somalia and Sierra Leone face the second and third highest lifetime risk of maternal death in the world, respectively. The best places to be born and to give birth are the Nordic countries, with Finland at the top. The worst is the Democratic Republic of Congo. The bottom ten are all in sub-Saharan Africa. The report attributes the fact that the US has the highest rate of preterm births in the industrialized world to poverty and racism.  The report is worth reading. Israel is ranked 25th in the Mother's Index, between the Czech Republic and Belarus and the US is ranked 30th. The table on page 69 of the report has some surprises. One might have expected Canada(22) to rank above Estonia(21) and France(16) above Slovenia(14). With the exception of Australia (10), the top ten are all in Western Europe. There is food for thought here, especially for people who oppose socialized medicine.

Frequently Asked Questions about the Mothers’ Index

Why doesn’t the United States do better in the rankings? The United States ranks 30th on this year’s Index. Although the U.S. performs quite well on educational and economic status (both 10th best in the world) it lags behind all other top-ranked countries on maternal health (46th in the world) and children’s well-being (41st in the world) and performs quite poorly on political status (89th in the world).

To elaborate:

• In the United States, women face a 1 in 2,400 risk of maternal death. Only five developed countries in the world – Albania, Latvia, Moldova, the Russian Federation and Ukraine – perform worse than the United States on this indicator. A woman in the U.S. is more than 10 times as likely as a woman in Estonia, Greece or Singapore to eventually die from a pregnancy- related cause.

• In the United States, the under-5 mortality rate is 7.5 per 1,000 live births. This is roughly on par with rates in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Qatar and Slovakia. At this rate, children in the U.S. are three times as likely as children in Iceland to die before their 5th birthday.

• Women hold only 18 percent of seats in the United States Congress. Half of all countries in the world perform better on this indicator than the U.S. Sixteen countries have more than double this percentage of seats occupied by women. In Finland and Sweden, for example, women hold 43 and 45 percent of parliamentary seats, respectively For comparison, there are 27 women among the 120 members elected this year to the Knesset (Parliament) in Israel, i.e.23% slightly better than the US, but still not up to standards of real democracy. We refer you to an analysis of the gender map of our Knesset.

QUESTIONS IN EVOLUTION-WHO CAME FIRST?
The sea creature known as the comb jelly is causing evolutionary biologists to look again at conventional wisdom. The comb jelly has a certain degree of complexity, i.e. a fairly sophisticated nervous system with a rudimentary brain and cellular connections called synapses that are also found in flies, humans and most other animals.

The sea gooseberry comb jelly Pleurobrachia bachei (left) snags prey with its long tentacles, while Mnemiopsis leidyi (right) employs mucus-covered lobes. Its appetite for fish eggs and larvae has crashed several fisheries.

From left: L.L. Moroz & M. Citarella/Univ. of Florida; William Browne/Univ. of Miami

 Yet, detailed looks at the genomes of two species of comb jellies suggest, surprisingly, that they are the most primitive animals, and not the jellyfish, sea anemones or corals, as has long been thought. It is even possible that the sophisticated comb jelly lineage may have evolved before the brainless, gutless, muscle-less sea sponges. Most biologists contend that the increase in complexity from the first clumping of cells is monotonic. The comb jelly genome lacks certain genes which implies that they branched off from the tree of life before sponges. This bodes well for the future of evolutionary biology, for as the famous physicist Niels Bohr once said "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."

BATTERED RINGS OF SATURN
The Solar System is a dangerous place especially if you are big and offer a tempting target. The Cassini imaging team has caught meteorites in the act of colliding with the rings of Saturn. The resulting images are most impressive and there is much to be learned from the frequency of the hits and the size of the debris.

Five images of Saturn's rings, taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft between 2009 and 2012, show clouds of material ejected from impacts of small objects into the rings. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Cornell

ANCIENT TONGUE
A new study in linguistics suggests that people in the northern world speak languages that are all descended from one common language spoken everywhere at the end of the last Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago. The theory, put forward by Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. is based on the study of cognates that serves as a form of "DNA" of language. The statistical study makes some strong claims and is, of course, controversial. There are some critical comments that make sense. In general, as well said by the late Carl Sagan, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." A Bayesian analysis might help resolve this issue.


FOOD ADDITIVES
Many of us take various food additives. Some indeed have passed FDA tests such as Glucosamine Sulfate for arthritic joints and others have turned out to be snake oil equivalents such as Omega 3 and Saw Palmetto. Bob Park whose blog focuses on voodoo science has ranted long and hard about the food additive industry that is totally unregulated and easily separates a fool and his gold. Here is how it works:

 


In Israel there is much talk of social protest and ranting against the ridiculous gap between tycoons and working stiffs. Dilbert's CEO would fit in here beautifully.

 



Fourier analysis is a very powerful mathematical tool for dealing with periodic phenomena in nature. 



We may apply it to Murphy when he next shows up with a turtle.

What If? is interesting in its usually weird way. Pollyanna will share it with you as usual.