Pollyanna late for April Fools' Day

As you can see, the jester had the day off   (actually he spent a good deal of time trying to educate a new Blackberry to conform to his wishes, with moderate success) and Pollyanna is late with her All Fools' Day blog.  I am sure you will be indulgent with her. She will try to be as upbeat as she can in these troubled times.

It has long been a tradition in the Western world to play pranks on April Fool's Day. The origin of the custom is lost in antiquity, but here are some hypotheses.   I recall attending a"serious" concert in Washington DC on April Fool's Day in 1997 that was devoted to the music of P.D.Q. Bach   Last year the Israel Philharmonic played some of it and in 1987 I was unable to obtain a ticket to the Los Angeles Philharmonic when they performed the immortal Concerto for Eight Wine Bottles and Orchestra under the baton of Peter Schickele. Schickele described in a radio interview how he had the woodwind players of the orchestra swear that they would not drink the wine in the tuned bottles..Let me share a little nightmare music with you



IN MEMORIAM GERALDINE FERRARO 

Pollyanna salutes a woman who did great things in her lifetime.  Geraldine Ferraro died this week at the age of 75 of blood cancer and its complications. She was a US Congresswoman 1978-84 and was the first woman to be nominated for Vice President by a major party in the United States. She ran with Walter Mondale against the incumbents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and they were defeated by a landslide in the 1984 elections. In addition she did many other things including serving as Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission. In many ways she was a trail blazer for the women of today who are making their mark in politics and other fields of endeavor. I append an obituary.

Pollyanna is always glad when new scientific advances open a window of hope for sick people. We have something like that to tell you about and it was research done at Tel Aviv University which makes us doubly glad and proud. On research at our university, more later.   Now we want to tell you about a new drug treatment to close the window on colon cancer.  It was developed by Prof. Shamgar Ben-Eliyahu, head of the Department of Psychology,  and is designed to block stress responses in cancer surgery patients and thus to save lives

From the Tel Aviv University Web Site
Cancer surgery wreaks havoc on a body`s immune system and stress hormones exacerbate the problem. As a result, about half of those who undergo surgery for tumor removal experience a recurrence of cancer in the same region or other parts of the body.  A new clinical approach being developed and tested by Tel Aviv University researchers may be the key to making cancer operations more successful. Prof. Shamgar Ben-Eliyahu, head of Tel Aviv University`s Department of Psychology, has opened on a new frontier in cancer research:  He is recruiting colon cancer patients for a new clinical study which will test a cocktail of drugs to prevent the negative effects of stress responses to surgery. If successful, it will help the immune system maintain its vigor and prevent the occurrence of new tumors.Prof. Ben-Eliyahu described his method in a recent issue of the Journal of Immunology and a paper in press. published on line. For more layperson details on this breakthrough, see the write up in Ha'aretz in English.

BUT...

Indeed Tel Aviv University is a major research institution and ranks high in research citations and impact. Carl Stenglo points out that this is in contrast to its low rating overall. It has a 100% rating in citations per faculty member but 17% in student/faculty ratio. TAU is 11th in the world in citations per faculty member, but is 138th overall. As was pointed out last year when Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry, all these achievements represent the fruit of past investments, whereas now the higher education system is going downhill rapidly. It is a definite choice of any right wing government which is hostile to academia, as we saw in the UK with Thatcher and in the US with Republican presidents. Academics tend to be progressive and liberal in their general world view and that does not go over well with fascist or semi-fascist regimes. Indeed there are right wingers in academia, but from what I have seen (anecdotal and not data) many of them are religious, which fact tends to inhibit the critical faculty that marks liberal scientists. This comment may generate outrage among some of you, but Pollyanna is a Reform Jewish liberal. She is also a physicist and likes cartoons like this one intended for the physicists in her readership.

The last of these blogs described the problems of Supersymmetry theory which is having trouble being validated by the LHC. In paleontology, we find something worse, an experimental result is coming under doubt and question and the community of seekers after the origins of life on Earth are having to do some serious rethinking. This, of course, is part of what makes science so much fun and so beautiful.and at the risk of being repetitive, I am showing again how this works.

This is something straight out of science fiction.  Wiring the brain to computer chips is something that people have fantasized about, for good or ill and now it appears to be coming into the real world.  I suggest you read Marge Piercy's He, She and It to get an idea what might be in store.  Is Pollyanna glad?  I hope so because it appears inevitable unless we drive ourselves extinct with the new Earth that we are creating.

CIRCUIT TO ME Nerve cells (purple) send extensions through specially designed tubes in this artist’s illustration, a setup that could help researchers create hybrid neural-electronic systems.

How new planets form in various stellar systems has long been an issue  of research.  Now we seem to be getting a handle on variablity of planetary types.   The link contains a fascinating video, click and enjoy.

OK, Pollyanna says she has gabbed long enough and will send you off with some   humor about short term memory deficit (who suffers from that?) from our old  friend Gene Weingarten.
 

Here comes Pollyanna again

NOT VERY POLLYANNA THIS WEEK

This has not been a good week for our friend Pollyanna and she would have a hard time finding something to be glad about. Of course, the festival of Purim is with us, but it is a bit muted this year.




Here in Israel we were struck by the cold-blooded murder of five members of one family, parents and three small children, by Palestinian terrorists, in the West Bank settlement of Ittamar. Whatever we might think of settlements in the Occupied Territories, this is a heinous crime against humanity. The killing of five members of the Fogel family - parents Udi, 37, and Ruth, 36, and three children, Yoav, Elad and Hadas, aged 10 years, four years and three months respectively – has been condemned by the entire world, including the  Palestinian Authority,  and I hope they cooperate in finding the culprits and that they .are found, tried and punished soon.

The victims of the Itamar settlement attack

 It is most unfortunate that this tragic event is being exploited as an excuse for violent reprisals against non-involved Palestinians and more settlement expansion and building.  This is certain to drive another nail in the coffin of our hopes for peace.  Indeed, we are seeing the disgusting picture of Jews carrying out a pogrom. The extremists on both sides are true colleagues to one another

EARTHQUAKE, TSUNAMI AND NUCLEAR DISASTER
On a broader scale of catastrophe we have the Sendai earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last week. It
is an event that is hard to comprehend. In addition to the "usual" loss of life and property, we have the danger of a nuclear catastrophe that can overshadow everything. Whereas the earthquake and tsunami are acts of nature, the nuclear reactors are the acts of irresponsible human beings.  For a running update follow the BBC news link which is continuously updated.  Let us hope that the threatening calamity at the reactors can be averted.  It is galling to think that the Japanese who are normally smart people and who have had the worst experience of all humanity with nuclear weapons should have fallen for the sales line of General Electric.   I would like to pass on the scathing comments of Rabbi Arthur Waskow  on the forces driving the irresponsible building of nuclear reactors, deep sea drilling and the hydraulic fracturing of shale rock that endangers water sources and how they are bound together by our insatiable demands for energy and our willingness to utilize  all means, viable or not, in the corporate pursuit of profit and gain.  The Rabbi says it much better than I could.

PLEASE HELP OUT
Normally one might expect a strong wealthy nation such as Japan to be capable of dealing with the effects of the disasters on its own, although the Katrina hurricane showed the impotence of the United States.  Indeed, they are handling things, but there are always those who slip through the cracks of the system.  I chose, therefore to donate to Oxfam which is helping mothers with infants and people who are not Japanese speakers.  I call on you to help out help out with a donation at this site.
As an example of how Japan is coping, I am posting a report from my colleague Nick Schneider who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He is a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder and was in Sendai for a scientific conference.  His report is  worth reading.   (I hope the document opens for you properly),

The geophysical aspects  of the event are of interest as well.  Major earthquakes in the past, such as those in Chile in 1960 and Alaska in 1964 have provided knowledge of the oscillation   spectrum of the Earth.   The physics of the event is well summarized by Live Science.   

The epicenter of the March 11 earthquake occurred near the east coast of Honshu, Japan.
CREDIT: USGS

 The magnitude of 9.0 was not measured on the obsolete Richter scale, which refers to the response of a certain instrument,  but on the Magnitude Moment Scale (MMS) which is related directly to the physical characteristics of the event such as the energy released, the displacement etc.  For medium quakes, the scales nearly coincide, but the Richter scale breaks down for superquakes.   For this event, the energy released was about 10**22 J or something like a billion Hiroshima-type bombs.  Japan was moved 2.4 meters to the east and the day was  shortened by 1.26 microseconds.  Indeed an indication of  how puny we humans are.  The  New Zealand quake of 8.8 is another example of what can happen if you live on the Pacific Ring of Fire.

More details of the science and the aftermath of the quake are available here.

Before leaving this topic, I want to rant ferociously at the capability of subhuman creatures that masquerade as people and broadcast on Fox News actually to  make fun of such a catastrophe,  Normal people with any sense of compassion and human decency would never descend to the level of Ross Limbaugh who mocked the victims and said that it must be a punishment for environmentalism.  Maybe I should not be surprised by such a phenomenon in a country where the population has become divorced from reality by a mass media complex and where there was a struggle to extend basic health services to 32 million people.  News has become entertainment.  When CNN  covered the Mumbai massacre of November 26, 2008, they included background music in the reportage!  I append an article on this topic entitled Why the Jokes about Japan's Tragedy by Phil Rockstroh and I recommend that you all read it carefully.  When people go to Fox for information it means that they are escaping from the real world.   Andy Borowitz and I know what they are getting and it would be funny if it were not so sad to see a great nation in decline.

LIBYA

I am glad to see that the great international community has quit dithering and has finally started to take action to prevent a genocide of the Libyan nation by their own leadership.  I have no intention of providing a blow-by-blow description, but can refer you to the BBC site which is updated continuously   

US and UK cruise missiles hit more than 20 Libyan air defence targets, Pentagon officials said

I wish  to discuss a different issue, namely the abstention of five Security Council members, in particular Germany.  The fact that the nation that carried out the greatest human rights violation in recent history could turn its eyes away from the Libyan people should not have come as a surprise.   In 2005 I participated as Chair of Amnesty International/Israel in the Chairs' Forum that took place in Haarlem, Netherlands.  The discussion dealt with the question of the position of the movement towards armed intervention to prevent grievous human rights violations.  The options that were up for discussion were:

1. To do nothing
2. To approve action if ordered by the UN Security Council
3. In case of Security Council paralysis brought about by veto, to approve action by regional organizations such as the Organization of African Unity that was to intervene in Darfour in the wake of the Chinese veto at the UN.

It was shocking to hear the German delegation advocating the first option, what they called the "pacifist position."  I stood up and gave them hell, pointing out that if there had been intervention after Kristallnacht, their grandparents might have been prevented from tearing the world apart and causing the deaths of untold millions of innocent people.  This was over a decade after the Rwanda genocide and just after the slaughter in the former Yugoslavia.   They did not like it, but AI Germany did invite our director, Amnon Vidan and  me to write an article for their newsletter on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.   We wrote the article and emphasized that the wrong lesson had been learned from the Holocaust.  In Israel we have internalized the message that this must never be allowed to happen again to Jews.  We should have learned that it should never be allowed to happen to anyone.  The Chair of AI Germany was taken aback when I objected to her statement "since we were liberated."  I pointed out to her that all of Europe was liberated from Germany and that it is not a good idea to whitewash history.  Some people just do not get it, alas.  Other do learn--in 1994 Yad Vashem did not consider the Rwanda genocide to be worthy of their attention, but did react appropriately to the Darfour killings.
I will skip the usual humorous ending of the blog, but Pollyanna would like to pass on a few science tidbits for you.
A beautiful mathematical theory of how the world functions at the quantum particle level, SUPERSYMMETRY , has run afoul of data from the Large Hadron Reactor.

The monster machine is not coming up with the superparticles predicted by the theory and it may well be back to the drawing board for theoretical physics. Some people have devoted their careers to this theory and other bright young things will have to come along and develop something new.  In the meantime,

Finally, some snippets of news from the world of life sciences.

Pollyanna is here again

Pollyanna is here again, trying to bring good news now and then.  It is not always easy.  Let me start this week by apologizing  and making amends. In the last Pollyanna blog I posted a link to a beautiful lecture by the Nobel Laureate astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar on beauty in art and science. I did not realize that the American Institute of Physics restricts access to its print subscribers. I now have it as a google doc and recommend it to you again.  The link should work.

IN MEMORIAM 

Nativa Ben Yehuda died this week at age 83. She was one of the real characters of our society, a Palmach fighter, a writer of humor and satire, including collaboration with  Dan Ben-Amotz and a wonderful radio host whose program had a large and faithful family of listeners. Her death  marks the passing of an era. I append an obituary    She gave great enjoyment to a huge number of people.  May she rest in peace.


The tragedy of the New Zealand earthquake that devastated the city of Christchurch continues to unfold and it is a tale of grief for hundreds of families.  Hope for survivors has been abandoned.

Recovery of bodies from the collapsed tower of Christchurch Cathedral is now underway

 The first foreign victims to be identified are two tourists from Israel, Ofer Levy, 22, and Gabi Moshe Ingel, 23. The forces of nature indeed serve to impress upon us how puny we really are on this planet.  In this picture we see a historic structure, the Time Ball, which was used to tell ships the time, badly damaged.  It is now feared to be unstable and may have to be demollished.

The 135-year old Timeball Station in Lyttelton Harbour is at risk

WOMEN'S RIGHTS
The UN has created a new body to advance the cause of women's rights and equality. I am all for it and suggest you check it out.

BULL FIGHTING AND ANIMAL ABUSE
This blog is supposed to be devoted to nice things, but I reserve the right to bring up issues that Pollyanna herself would have raised.  One such issue is the barbaric sport of bull fighting which still survives in Spain and its former colonies.  It is one with bear baiting which is now a thing of the past and  with other atavistic "sports" such as cock fighting and dog fighting which are still around, to the shame of all.    There are initiatives to ban bull fighting in the respective countries and you can take action against this ghastly activity.

In particular you can put in a call for the city council to outlaw bull fighting in Mexico City.  Please click on this link  and let the legislators know what you think of the issue.


SCIENCE UPDATES

The Sun gave us a pyrotechnic show with a monster flare last week. There was a  Class 3 flare on the limb which provided a great show for some solar telescopes and space-borne instruments. Here is a video



To compare it to Earth look at this.  Indeed we are puny creatures and it is good that nature can teach us humility without killing us.  BTW, there is no danger from this flare, it is not aimed at us.  If it were, it would at most have shaken up the magnetosphere and maybe interfered with some satellite communication, if at all. To read more  go to this link.

FOSSIL FEET
Here is some interesting information on new research on Lucy and her relatives.   It appears that these hominids had arched feet similar to ours.

OLDEN ARCHES The bones of a human foot curve upward to form arches, including a toe bone that corresponds in crucial ways to a 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis toe fossil (above foot). Researchers say that this shared toe trait indicates that early hominids walked much as people do today.Kimberly Congdon, C. Ward, Elizabeth Harman

A few years ago I happened to be in Houston. TX at a time when the Lucy fossil and other finds from Afar were on display at the local museum.  There was also a fascinating exhibition on the history and culture of Ethiopia.

ALZHEIMER AND MEMORY

One of the terrible ravages of aging is the loss of cognitive abilities caused by Alzheimer's disease. It has long been a subject of research since Alzheimer's pioneering studies over a century ago, but in fact little is known about the mechanisms. Even the main culprit A-amyloid appears to be only one of many agents involved. The brain is a complex system and there are far too many confounding variables Here is an update on recent research. .

Differences in a healthy brain (top) and a diseased one (bottom) clearly show the damage wrought by Alzheimer’s.©   Maggie Steber/National Geographic Society, Corbis

Bilingualism was an issue for us when our children were small.  I wanted to teach Zohar English as a small child but was constrained by elders who said that it was bad.  Perforce, she became bilingual when we went to the US for graduate school and for the others it was a default.   It has been found now that the old conventional wisdom was nonsense and that bilingual infants have a cognitive advantage in later life.  It is nice to know that my instincts were right.

As usual, we wind up with some deep(?) insights (into utter silliness) from Gene Weingarten in Below the Beltway.

Here comes Pollyanna again

It is nice to share some of the joy of the Egyptian people with Pollyanna.  Indeed we do not know for sure where the revolution will go but we can only hope that the same leaders who brought it about will not be fooled by any fake reforms that the military will try to sell them.

A soldier celebrating with the masses in Cairo

 

The pundits who were so surprised are now guessing and trying to predict.  Most of it is wild speculation but there is an article by Roger Cohen  that casts some light on what is behind this uprising that is spreading like a contagion throughout the Muslim world.  It may be that for the moment the despots in Iran and the Gulf Emirates will succeed in putting down the people, but the genie will not go back into the bottle.

Thanks to Yosefa for passing this very true cartoon on to me.

MORE FEBRUARY BIRTHDAYS 
I try to follow the advice of   Ben Sira the sage who told us:
" Let us now sing the praises of famous men, our ancestors in their generations. 2 The Lord apportioned to them great glory, his majesty from the beginning. 3 There were those who ruled in their kingdoms, and made a name for themselves by their valor; those who gave counsel because they were intelligent; those who spoke in prophetic oracles; 4 those who led the people by their counsels and by their knowledge of the people's lore; they were wise in their words of instruction; 5 those who composed musical tunes, or put verses in writing"
 

Last week in the Titan  blog I mentioned the birthdays of Copernicus and Galileo, two icons of science and intellectual freedom who were born in February.   In the last issue of this blog I discussed Ludwig Boltzmann whose great equation finally was given a complete solution.  This week I wish to remind you of two men who were born on the same day February 12, 1809   Abraham Lincoln

and  Charles Darwin

I always call them the two great liberators, Lincoln  freed people from physical slavery and Darwin  freed us from intellectual servitude to the stultifying dogmas of religion.  Of course, Copernicus and Galileo did their share of tending that vineyard as well.  Let us salute all those who labor in the cause of the human rights of our intellects and minds.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995)

In the spirit of the above, I would like to call your attention to one of the greatest astrophysicists of all time, the beloved and admired  Chandra. whose centennial was marked last year.  It is most appropriate that a spacecraft observatory surveying the universe in X-rays has been named for him.  In addition to being a superb scientist and leader in the field, he had a deep understanding of the beauty of the world of the humanities.

Let me boast a bit about my colleague from our department at Tel Aviv University Akiva Bar-Nun whose achievements in laboratory simulations of comets have brought him worldwide recognition and even some fame on the local scene.  Here's to you Akiva!! 

A spacecraft named after another great scientist Johannes Kepler  has turned up a gaggle of extrasolar planetary systems.  It should keep astronomers busy and off the streets for quite a while.

An artist's conception, Tom Pyle, NASA

 WHALES

Here is some good news, the suspension of the Japanese whale hunt caused by the great people of Sea Shepherd  who pursued  and harassed the whaling fleet in the Antarctic.

In this Feb. 9 photo released by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, activists aboard the high-speed trimaran Gojira prepare to fire a slingshot toward the Japanese whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru on Feb. 9 in Southern Ocean, Antarctica.

HAPPINESS is to be found in a particular place in our brain, the amygdala which in the past was known to be associated with fear.  It appears according to new research that it appreciates good things as well. 

This week's book review is of a biography of J.D. Salinger by Kenneth Slawenski reviewed by Jay McInerney in the New York Times Review of Books.   I hope you find it interesting.  I did.

Those of you who deal in psychoceramics (the science of cracked pots) might want to take a look at the revelations of the final prophet of God    We are told that paper will tolerate anything.  Indeed it will, and so will silicon.

This week in Below the Beltway Gene discusses the issue of weeping by women with his feminist interlocutor Gina.  

Welcome to Pollyanna February 4, 2011

This week saw Chinese New Year, the ending of the Year of the Tiger and the beginning of the Year of the Rabbit.  Let us hope for a better and more peaceful year.  We are told that it will be a more placid year than the year that has just ended.  I append a general horoscope for whatever it is worth. You can all find your personal horoscopes on the Web, but I as a skeptic will not direct you to them.

A major question is whether Punxsutawny Phil the famous Pennsylvania groundhog saw his shadow on Wednesday. Since the eastern US was under snow advisory and the skies were very cloudy, he did not and an early spring is expected. Most of you probably saw the film  Groundhog Day and enjoyed it. 

This is a week that belongs to the Pollyanna blog, but besides the usual happy goodies, I feel the need to bring in a few current events matters. I assume that Pollyanna would be glad to see the people of Egypt taking their lives into their own hands after countless years, decades, even centuries of repression, foreign dominance, military and civilian corrupt dictatorships, incredible poverty and social injustice without end. 

 


Many Israelis look with dread at the ongoing revolution in Egypt. I ask every such person would you condemn the Egyptian people to live under a corrupt dictatorship when they could live under a corrupt democracy as the rest of us do? Excuse the cynicism. I agree with Churchill that democracy is a very bad way to run a country, but all others are worse. I am convinced that Egypt, if governed in accordance with its true interests,  will have no stomach for war and the economic advantages of the peace with Israel should outweigh any other considerations. The days of Nasser and Pan-Arab hegemony are past for a country beset by endemic poverty and underdevelopment, that would not survive a day without the US handout.  Indeed it was cynical on the part of Mubarak to collaborate with us on the Gaza strip and to fail to support the efforts to bring the Occupation to an end.  I append some links to analysis of the struggle. from a progressive viewpoint.    I also append an interesting local analysis by Gershon Baskin.   The implications of a leadership vacuum are not encouraging, but the fall of the corrupt rule of Mubarak was inevitable.  It is doubtful that the West can influence events now although they lost an opportunity through hesitation.  We can only hope that the Egyptian people will manage to work out their own destiny.  What will be good for them will be good for all.

OK, on to nicer stuff.
Polar Bears

Polar bear female looking for ice

This valuable creature is under threat from global warming since it needs sea ice to hunt its food, mostly seals and fish. It appears now that there is hope for the polar bear if we humans can get our act together. It is far too clear that warming is real and that it is caused by us. Let us start to do serious things about it.  It depends on us so please read and give it thought and action. 

MUSIC IN THE RAILROAD STATION

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma photo Keri Wigniton/Tribune

Music for the Masses--cheers for the Citizens' Music Movement launched in Chicago by the local symphony
orchestra. Rehearsed professional flash mobs are all well and good, but the introduction of classical music into the public space needs continuity and, more importantly, true spontaneous involvement of people on the spot.. Let us salute the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Yo-Yo Ma for their  involvement in the musical takeover of a railroad station.

EARTHSHINE
If you have clear skies Saturday and Sunday nights you should look at the setting moon which is new and very gibbous. You will see on the dark part of the moon a filmy light. That is Earthshine, sunlight reflected from the Earth onto the moon. The phenomenon was explained 500 years ago by Leonardo da Vinci.

MERCURY
The planet Mercury has always been hard to observe in detail because of its proximity to the Sun. No one
wants to ruin a good telescope by exposing it to sunlight. The planet has had some spacecraft visits and now it is being observed by MESSENGER which will soon go into orbit around it. The project scientist Ralph McNutt is a dear friend and I know many of the dramatis personae of the project. I refer you to a fascinating discussion of the planet as we know it now in the latest issue of  Physics Today.

WEEK IN SPACE
While we are with astronomy and astrophysics, here is the new  Week in Space calendar for your perusal.
Note the 40th anniversary of the first golf ball hit on the Moon. Also  skeptical voices are being raised about
cosmic reincarnation. A few weeks ago I posted a story about a claim that the Big Bang had taken place more than once. This analysis of background radio astronomy data has been challenged and it may well be in error. I was told by Judy that a colleague of hers in Tel Aviv had also found errors in the analysis. I will post the counter arguments and we will await developments as the controversy rages on.

SOLUTION OF BOLTZMANN'S EQUATION
As a plasma physicist, I have lived for my entire career with Boltzmann's equation and have of course
never solved anything except very special cases.  The dream of a general solution for the full
seven-dimensional Boltzmann equation has finally come true and I invite those interested to read all about it. Boltzmann was born on my birthday February 20, albeit in the year 1844. Unfortunately shared astrology did not make a Ludwig Boltzmann out of me.

CHAOS AND HEART ATTACKS
Prediction of heart attacks would be a major means of prevention and enhancing survival rates. An unexpected push in that direction comes from of all places Chaos Theory in mathematics. It is always nice to see different parts of science helping one another such as the case of the immune system and statistical physics that we reported here last time. Biophysics and Bio-mathematics appear to be growth areas, although that has been going on for a very long time.

ORIGIN OF THE GENOME
In recent years the human genome has been mapped and more and more progress continues to be made in interpretation of the genetic code. What is totally not understood today is how the genetic code began, in other words the origin of life. Some progress is starting to show up and it is interesting. I invite you to give this review article a read. I will not spoil things by giving away too much.
BOOK REVIEW
I am adding another feature to Pollyanna, a link to an interesting book review. This week I shall send
you to Science News for a review of The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of
Forensic Science By Douglas Starr, reviewed by Erika Engelhaupt . The review piqued my interest and I
intend to read the book soon. 
As usual we wind up with Gene Weingarten who gets us on to something that will cause you to be obsessed. Consider yourself warned before reading  Below the Beltway.

Welcome to the world of Pollyanna

  Hi everyone,
this is the week of Tu B'Shvat, the Jewish holiday of nature.  In Israel it is a day for tree planting and going out to enjoy nature with which no one can argue.  In the Talmud it is mentioned as the New Year of fruit tithes.  The idea was that a date in the winter serves as a way of separating the fruits of last year from the fruits of the coming year.  |In medieval times, the Kabbalists devised a seder of fruits and wine associated with the spheres of heaven and earth and the types of people who inhabit them.  I have participated many times in such a seder as conducted by our former Rabbi.  In the 20th century it was  adopted by the Zionist movement and the JNF as a tree and nature day and now it is the central holiday of the Green Movement.  So enjoy the great outdoors and the sweet fruits which which our land is blessed.

on

This week also marks the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. which is celebrated throughout the US.  It coincides more or less with the reading in synagogue of the story of the Exodus from Egypt and the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery.  I once spoke in synagogue on the fact that he is not only analogous to Moses, but also to the Hebrew midwives, Shifra and Pu'a who disobeyed the racist orders of Pharaoh and did not kill the male infants.  Civil disobedience at great risk when standing up for moral principles is a great virtue.  Dante wrote that there is a special place in hell for those who remain silent during times of moral crisis.  King wrote that the evil of the bad is less distressing than the indifference of the good.  His legacy is worthy of our attention today.

This week there is an event in Prague honoring Sir Nicholas Winton now aged 101 who rescued hundreds of Jewish children in 1938,   He truely deserves to be considered among the righteous of the nations of the Earth.  So let us praise these great people who set an example for all of us.

Round and Round They Go  The fact that stars appear to be fixed in their positions in the night sky is partly the result of our relatively short life spans. All stars are in motion, most of them imperceptibly, but over time and with increasingly sophisticated observational tools it has become possible to map just where and how fast the stars are moving. Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn, born 160 years ago this week, devoted considerable effort to measuring the proper motion of stars, and he found that most were not traveling randomly, as had been thought, but were heading in one of two opposing directions. Kapteyn’s analysis provided some of the earliest evidence for the rotation of our galaxy. Seen here is NGC 2903, a rotating barred spiral galaxy slightly smaller than our own, 30 million light-years away.
Image credit: R. Jay GaBany / www.cosmotography.com

In the spirit of marking birthdays and holidays, I am including a link to the calendar blog, The Year in Space  that contains many interesting events and anniversaries, such as the above picture in memory of Jacobus Kapteyn.  If you like it  or not, please comment.  If you like it, I will include it every week.  I am sure the bloggers will not mind.

Walking down memory lane  is something that we all like to do.  It is of interest that the walk is enhanced by the ongoing birth of new neurons in our brains.  This is encouraging for those of us who are getting on in years and would like our minds to stay with us as long as possible.  Contrary to what my daughter Zohar says, I have not given up on my mind yet.  She said this in the context of the fact that my late wife was a psychologist and my partner now is a physician, i.e. now that I have given up on my mind I now have a doctor around to look after what is left.  Some of you may agree with her, but I am still trying.

A supercluster of galaxies as it appears in Planck data (l) and in XMM data (r). Such structures contain hundreds of billions of suns

The Planck Space Telescope is revolutionizing our view of the universe.  I would like to share some of these mind-boggling discoveries with you.   It has found dozens of huge clusters of galaxies, the largest structures ever found in the universe. Its findings in the microwave spectrum where it sees the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) are confirmed by the X-ray observations of the Newton satellite shown on the right of the figure. The CMB is the radiation left over from the Big Bang that created our universe. I could go on about this forever, but instead will refer you to a BBC science report that contains links to other sources. 
Here is a nice shot of the universe gathered by Planck  over a year of observing.

Planck's view of the entire sky: Ultimately, scientists must remove all the foreground "noise" (blue) to get a clear view of the CMB (magenta and yellow)

 It is of interest to look back in time at the Big Bang and indeed what has been found is that there must be more out there than we can see, the so-called dark matter and dark energy, needed to account for the expansion of the universe.  I refer you to an interesting article in the New York Times science section.
Thanks to Richard for pointing it out.

In Israel we  are looking to desalinization to resolve our water crisis.  Now doubts have been raised about how eco-friendly the process is and what might be the hidden costs.  Not only is the energy involved considerable, it can have ecological effects, such as harming marine life.  If it focuses on brackish ground water, then there may be seismological problems.  For a review of this complex issue I recommend this article in Slate magazine.

 Congratulations to  the author IanMcEwan

on the occasion of his winning the Jerusalem prize.  I enjoyed both Atonement and Amsterdam and consider it a good choice.

Let us wind up with Andy Borowitz  and Gene Weingarten Below the Beltway .

Really great music to be taken away from us

 

Here comes Pollyanna again-January 7, 2011

Welcome to the first Pollyanna blog of 2011.  We Jews get to celebrate New Years Day twice, one in synagogue and once wherever having fun.

This has not been a week that Pollyanna would have enjoyed in Israel or around the world.  We are hearing about floods in Australia,  assassination  of a liberal politician in Pakistan and the passage of fascist legislation in Israel.   I would like to wish a Merry Christmas to our friends who observe the Orthodox calendar, especially the Copts in Egypt who suffered a terrible terrorist attack on their church in Alexandria last week.

Nevertheless, I shall try to find some good things to share with you.  We can start with something quite amusing:

THE VILLAGE IDIOTS
Some of you may recall that serious news media in Saudi Arabia picked up on an Andy Borowitz satire in which he claimed that Obama was willing to admit to the Republicans that he was a Muslim and that his birth place was negotiable, possibly in the mid-Atlantic in return for the odd vote in the House of Representatives..  The Saudis took it seriously and trumpeted that indeed Obama was one of the Faith.  This week they cemented their claim to be the village idiots of the Middle East with the story of an espionage vulture used by Israel to spy upon them.


The poor griffin vulture (an endangered species) was carrying a GPS device placed on it by Israeli zoologists to track its migration pattern.  This competes very well with Egyptian claims that the shark of Sharm el Sheik had been sent by the Mossad to harm the Egyptian tourist industry.  Of course, since the Mossad does not own sharks, it must have borrowed it from Steven Spielberg, which of course makes it a loan shark.  (adapted from a bad pun by Aaron Barnes).  If there was only one shark, it also was a lone shark.  Sorry about that...
BTW, I was told once by an Amnesty International colleague from Norway that, according to Swedish TV, the Norwegians are the descendants of the village idiots of the Mediterranean.  The proof lies in the fact that when the ice sheets receded they followed them.  I have never figured out what this implies about the Swedes, but we have enough troubles of our own without concerning ourselves with the internal politics of Scandinavia.
CHEMISTRY NEWS
January 1, 2011, ushers in the International Year of Chemistry. The American Chemical Society has compiled on online calendar that points to landmark events and trivia to celebrate on roughly 250 days, if you’re so inclined.  Some of the events are more earth shaking than others, but this is  chemistry not seismology...
Another piece of news from the Chemistry Department is the updating of the format of the periodic table to reflect the existence of isotopes and to show the range of masses of each element found in nature.

SOCCER FOR PEACE
Before we go on to the science fun, let me report on a  soccer tournament  in Jerusalem 
that brought together Jewish and Arab children.

  It will not make peace in the Middle East but at least a few kids learned that the other is not a demon.

HOT STUFF

As a space plasma physicist, I have long shared the frustration of not understanding why the solar corona is several hundred  times hotter than the surface of the Sun.  Judy (thank you) pointed out a recent publication that indicates that we might have a handle on it and that instead of the magnetohydrodynamic waves whose absorption never provided a satisfactory answer in terms of energy, it may be in the spicules.  These wispy filaments coming out appear to have enough energy to drive the heating.  So let us salute Bart De Pontieu for this exciting result.  For details go to Physics World  or to Scientific American..  For those with library access, the paper was published in Science, January 7.
BIOPHYSICS MAKES THE DIFFERENCE

Physicists are mapping out how T cells (yellow) and other immune players respond to threats like viruses (blue).

 Biologists have long struggled to figure out how the immune system protects us from disease and infection.  Until recently the details have remained a mystery.  Now the introduction of statistical physics to model the interactions has shed light on the conundrum.  I am linking to a  report on recent progress.   It is somewhat long and detailed, but IMHO well worth the read.  I found it fascinating.

NEW RESULTS IN PALEONTOLOGY
I quote here  a press release from Tel Aviv University about new findings in Israel that may shake up our view of the earliest history of our species.   For those of you who have library access to Nature News  I append a link to an interview with the researchers  that will also show some of the controversial aspects of the discovery and its interpretation.

The Qesem Cave site in Israel has yielded ancient human teeth with controversial implications.

Evidence was discovered pointing to the existence of modern man (Homo sapiens) in Israel as early as 400,000 years ago
This is the earliest evidence for the existence of modern man anywhere in the world : Up to now remains have been found of modern man from around 200,000 years ago only in Africa, and the accepted approach has been that modern man originated on that continent.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University have uncovered finds that indicate the existence of modern man (Homo sapiens) in Israel as early as about 400,000 years ago. This is the earliest evidence for the existence of modern man anywhere in the world. The findings were discovered in the Qesem Cave, a pre-historic site located near Rosh Ha’ayin that was uncovered in 2000, and are now being published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Researchers Prof. Avi Gopher and Dr. Ran Barkai of the Institute of Archaeology, who run the excavations at the Qesem Cave, and Prof. Israel Hershkowitz of the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine, together with an international team of scientists performed a morphological analysis on eight human teeth found in the Qesem Cave.
The detailed morphological analysis of the teeth, which included CT scans and X-rays, indicates that the size and shape of the teeth are very similar to those of modern man, early findings of which were previously discovered dating back only 200,000 years on the African continent. The teeth found in the Qesem Cave are very similar to evidence of modern man from Israel, dated to around 100,000 years ago, discovered in the Skhul Cave in the Carmel and Qafzeh Cave in the Lower Galilee near Nazareth.
Qesem Cave is dated to the period between 400,000 and 200,000 years BP (before the present) and archaeologists working there believe that the findings indicate significant changes in the behavior of ancient man. This period of time was crucial in the history of mankind from cultural and biological perspectives, and the fact that teeth of modern man were discovered indicates that these changes are apparently related to evolutionary changes taking place at that time.
Prof. Avi Gopher and Dr. Ran Barkai noted that the findings that characterize the culture of those who dwelled in the Qesem Cave, such as the systematic production of flint blades, the habitual use of fire, evidence of hunting, cutting and sharing of animal meat, mining raw materials to produce flint tools from subsurface sources and much more, reinforce the hypothesis that this was, in fact, innovative and pioneering behavior that may correspond with the appearance of modern man.
According to researchers, the discoveries made in the Qesem Cave may change the perception that has been widely accepted to date, according to which modern man originated on the continent of Africa. In recent years archaeological evidence and human skeletons have been discovered in Spain and China that are liable to undermine this perception, but the findings now uncovered at Qesem Cave are significant and invaluable, and their early age is undoubtedly an extraordinary archaeological discovery. Excavations at Qesem Cave continue and the researchers hope to uncover additional finds that will enable them to confirm the findings published up to now and to enhance our understanding of the evolution of mankind, and especially the appearance of modern man.



FEMALE TORAH SCRIBES

Last month we (YandA) visited the Jewish Museum in San Francisco where we saw a video of the work of a female Torah scribe.  We reported on it in our YandA travel blog. which I invite you to visit.  Now we have a report on another female Torah scribe who is fighting against male chauvinism while remaining within the Orthodox fold.  Let us all salute her.

ENGLISH AS SHE IS SPOKE AND WROTE IN ISRAEL

There is a widespread myth that educated Israelis speak and write English fluently. Over the years as a
Tel Aviv University faculty member I encountered countless counter examples. I taught a course in
scientific writing in English for Ph.D. students and while some of them were reasonably competent in the language, I turned down most of the applicants for the course. I might add that the writing skills of
most of them in Hebrew were not much better since the techniques that are (were?) taught in schools in
the US are absent in the local school curriculum. Even if we leave aside the total inability to come to
terms with perfect tenses and other mysteries of the universe, far too often we are called upon to read
something that is nearly incomprehensible. As an example, I append a weather forecast   that could make
you both laugh and cry. I wonder if it was done by a computer. For example, why would Friday have more than one afternoon and "Tomorrow the winds have changed..." is priceless. This site appears to be a private meteorological company and I wonder if anyone paid for this forecast. Someone named Boaz Dayan has his name on it. He also has a Facebook link so I suggest you all go there and castigate him for the terrible English that he writes. 

Of course I am not going to send you off without a Gene Weingarten Below the Beltway comment.

Have a nice week everyone.  I apologize for some of the format irregularities.  Sometimes this blogger software seems to have a mind of its own.