Pollyanna is back

Pollyanna greets you all. As Ramadan draws to a close, she, her brother Titan and their friends YandA wish all their Muslim friends Eid Saeed--a bit early for August 8, but it is her only chance.  Let us hope for peace by the next Ramadan.

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.

CHARITY CORNER

Because she is a girl she can be stolen from her mom and dad, and forced to be someone's slave. She can be made to do hard labor from morning until night.

This week it is Pollyanna's turn to promote a charity. Her choice is "Because I am a Girl" which supports the empowerment of girls and young women to take charge of their lives. The Web site offers many ways to participate in this campaign. Choose what you think is important and donate whatever you can.

IN MEMORIAM 
Virginia E. Johnson, the female half of the Masters and Johnson scientific research duo that in the late 1960s redefined sex as a quantifiable, perfectible pleasure of human life to be pursued without guilt or fear, died July 24 in St. Louis. She was 88.

Virgina E. Masters in 1997 (AP Photo/James A. Finley, File)

Their work made a major contribution to the quality of life of many people. They debunked many misconceptions such as the idea that sex was off limits for the elderly and that the size of the male organ was critical. The ads that we get on the Web show that the latter idea has not reached a large part of the population. The Washington Post has a detailed obituary of Ms Johnson, linked above. RIP

MARIA MITCHELL IS 195 

Maria Mitchell was born on August 1, 1818, in Nantucket, Massachusetts. She was a famous astronomer, the first female professional in the field, during a time in which women were not encouraged to enter the sciences. As a young woman she discovered a comet by means of a telescope and was awarded a medal by the King of Denmark. Her life can serve as an inspiration to any young woman seeking a science career.
  
THE GREAT BARRIER REEF 
Pollyanna will use her rant this time to call upon you to make an effort to protect the Great Barrier Reef from the irresponsible idiots of the coal mining industry in Australia. They want to run coal ships through the reef. Please join the protest of AVAAZ to the Prime Minister of Australia. The reef is too valuable a resource for humanity to be allowed to die.


THE POPE SOUNDS OK 

The recent pronouncement "who am I to judge?" by the Pope with respect to gay people is a pleasant surprise. We have become used to homophobia from the religious establishment based on Leviticus XX, 13 that prescribes the death penalty for male homosexual actions. The Bible says nothing about lesbianism. In any case, the relatively liberal attitude of the Pope may engender a backlash, but should open the Church to LGBT people. Orthodox Judaism is adamantly homophobic, but there are gay synagogues, the first of which Bet Chayim Hadashim, which also includes straights, was  founded in 1972 in Los Angeles.

SCIENCE TIDBITS 
PLANETARY STUFF

The universe appears to be crawling with planets.
We have now firm evidence for thousands of planets, around thousands of stars. We also know something about these worlds, their sizes, their orbits, often their ages. In a handful of cases, for planets of Jupiter’s or Neptune’s size, we have even measured the temperature of their upper atmospheres and sniffed at their gaseous chemistry, finding substances like sodium, methane and water.
One out of seven of these should, statistically, be an Earth-like object in its star's habitable zone. The implications of this are blowing Pollyanna's mind.

Phil Plait whose Bad Astronomy blog is on our margin loves illusions. Incidentally, the link to Phil now goes through Slate webzine and you can get strange things. Just hit the health and science tab and you will find his great stuff. We are including a special now, illusions of the moon, and we do not mean the lunar-induced idea of going to bed now with her/him. Phil shows us how our brains can play tricks on us when we look at things, in this case domes that look like craters and craters that look like domes.

If anyone tells you that planetary astronomy is a piece of cake, believe it. A Jupiter cake was created by Rhiannon, an Australian woman trained in zoology but clearly with a knack for baking (she has a blog and a Facebook page which you really need to look through if you like yummy beautiful desserts).

It's delicious, by Jove!
Photo by Rhiannon at cakecrumbs.me

Thanks again to Phil for finding her and her baking artistry. I wonder if she could bake the satellites as well. Her version of Io would be fascinating.

We are confirmed Mozilla Firefox users, but never thought  that the Creator would use the logo to adorn the universe until Phil pointed it out. The similarity is compelling.


NEWLY DISCOVERED MOON OF NEPTUNE
In 1989 we participated as members of the Plasma Science team on Voyager 2 in the encounter with Neptune. We focused on Triton, the big moon with the retrograde revolution (just revolves around Neptune in the opposite sense to the rotation of the planet, our moon is prograde with the Earth), but we trusted our buddies on the imaging squad to find all the moonlets and junk in orbit. It appears that one satellite, about 20 km in size, escaped their scrutiny and has only now been found by Mark Showalter in Hubble images of Neptune. Cheers to Mark and to little S/2004 N 1, moon number 14, which now has a name after 4.6 billion
years of anonymity.

LIFE SCIENCE
HYPE THE BRAIN SCAN? 

Medical MRI Image Showing Brain and Skull
Photo by iStockphoto/Thinkstock

The advent of functional NMR or MRI if you prefer has led to many interesting breakthroughs in neuroscience. Unfortunately the field has been overhyped, not by the excellent scientists doing groundbreaking work in biomedical science, but by all kinds of hucksters who see in it a way to a quick buck. A recent Slate article by Daniel Engber reviews a new book by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld entitled Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, what Engber calls a well-informed attack on the extravagances of “neurocentrist” thought. We’re living in dangerous era,
the authors warn in the book’s introduction. “Naïve media, slick neuroentrepreneurs, and even an occasionaloverzealous neuroscientist exaggerate the capacity of scans to reveal the contents of our minds, exalt brain physiology as inherently the most valuable level of explanation for understanding behavior, and rush to apply underdeveloped, if dazzling, science for commercial and forensic use.” Others have also rushed to attack brain science, often in a manner totally unfair to scientists. Even Satel and Lilienfield agree as to the value of the research, but question whether the brain is indeed the mind. Certainly mental functions can be understood by looking at the functions of the brain. No one, least of all the scientific community, will miss the brain entrepreneurs and snake oil men, but the pejorative "mindless brain science" is certainly out of place. There may be legitimate debate about methodology, but we cannot avoid the impression that more attention is being paid here to off the cuff comments than to substantive issues of the scientific work. What do you think?

HI FLIPPER!

Enlarge

Wild bottlenose dolphins (one shown) respond to hearing their "signature whistles," specific high-pitched tunes that may serve as the animals' names.

Courtesy of V. Janik, University of St. Andrews

We have long known that dolphins are intelligent, self-aware creatures. That is why the film The Cove (2010 Oscar for best documentary)  about slaughter of dolphins for the Japanese food market so outraged us. New research by scientists from St. Andrew's University in Scotland indicates that dolphins identify themselves by a signature whistle that amounts to a name. This ability to name individuals appears unique to humans and dolphins.
DISPUTE OVER BONES
Bones, discovered recently in a cave in South Africa have ignited a major controversy in the paleontology community. The question is who is the ancestor of the homo lineage. The fact that there is a controversy is good for the science and eventually new data will resolve things.

Enlarge

A partial reconstruction of A. sediba from multiple specimens reveals a creature that was a hodgepodge of human and ape features.

Courtesy of L. Berger/Univ. of the Witwatersrand

PREDATION IN NATURE
Animals, including us, must eat and carnivores must prey to do so. In 2004 we took our grandson Joey to Kruger Park in South Africa where we saw an example of it in action. The injustice is that the waterbuck fawn was killed by a leopard who needed food for her cubs, but she was chased off by hyenas who enjoyed the spoils.

When the rangers had a controlled brush burn, our guide took us there to see birds coming from all
around to feast on the insects driven from the burning brush. We would like to share a couple of  videos of predation attempts on sea and land, failed and successful. We hope you are not squeamish. First we show
what happens when a great white shark is foolish enough to attack an orca whale calf. Mama is having
none of it and her big mammalian brain gives her the win. Sharks would do well to stick to seals as a
food source.



On land we see what happens when a hippopotamus and her calf have the misfortune to run into a pride of lions. One might think this would be prey too large for the lionesses and indeed they call in His Nibs to help with the hunt and kill.   


SILLY TIME 
What If asks what material should be used to prevent an airplane from taking off. It is an interesting question and the answers are amusing.

PUNS FROM HELL OR ARE THEY ALL FROM HELL


Dilbert is just as bad, or rather our friend Wally:


ANGEL OF DEATH SCREWUP
The late Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin wrote a play that we saw and appreciated  entitled "Everyone Wants to Live." The deputy angel of death shows up to pick up the protagonist whom we have already learned to hate but is thwarted by a typo in the bill of lading for the soul. The victim is given a reprieve for 24 hours to find someone to take his place. Levin gives us the full benefit of his satire and wit. SMBC seems to have caught the principle.

Zack Weiner also understands the difference between mathematics and physics. How many of you have used Mathematica? It is software that does the drudgery part of calculations, bless it. Maple does the same.
We love them all.

 

Pollyanna is with you. again. She apologizes for scatterbrain Titan who remembered Ramadan, but forgot to congratulate our French readers for Bastille Day. Joyeux jour de la Bastille albeit belated.

 
 Pollyanna herself was a bit late for Canada Day and the Fourth of July as well. We hope you all had fun.
Pollyanna also wishes Nelson Mandela a recovery from his illness and marks the 95th birthday of this great man and leader. There should be more like him scattered around the world.

Messages left by supporters are seen on a poster of former South African President Nelson Mandela outside his Soweto home. (Jerome Delay / Associated Press / July 18, 2013)

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.

CHARITY CORNER 
This week it is Pollyanna's turn to promote a charity. She chose two active organizations that help battered women in Israel. There are 142,000 abused women in Israel, spanning the entire spectrum of society. Woman to Woman, is a nonprofit that runs a shelter for battered women. Donations can be made both in Israel and from abroad at their Web site. Meir Panim helps the women regain critically needed independence by offering a post-shelter rehabilitation program that launches them on a path towards emotional and financial self-sufficiency. Please pitch in. Pollyanna and Titan want to do something besides ranting and we hope this has some impact.
  
WAVE AT SATURN AND CASSINI 
This Friday night between 2127 and 2142 UT (Greenwich)we will all be on camera from Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft is to be positioned to take a scan of Saturn and its entire ring system during a total eclipse of the Sun. Earth will show up in the background. Carolyn Porco, the head of imaging on Cassini, is calling for everyone to take 15 minutes to step outside, gaze up into the blackness of space, be grateful for our existence, and maybe even wave. “Take a moment to reflect on our cosmic whereabouts and the significance of the accomplishments that allow this interplanetary photo session to happen,” she urges. “Think about how precious life is, about our place in the cosmos. Look up and smile.” Pollyanna recommends these links about the event.

NO CARS, WOW!
Yes Virginia, there is a place in America where cars were banned in 1898 and the ban has never been repealed. It is the town of Mackinac Island, in Lake Huron, offshore of Michigan. The city council decided as follows in 1898:
“Resolved: That the running of horseless carriages be prohibited within the limits of the village of Mackinac.” — Mackinac Island Village Council, July 6, 1898”
Mackinac Island has a permanent population of 500, but there are 15,000 or so tourists there at any time during the summer. The town must be a really nice place.  

Photo credit: Cletch on Flickr

 A propos horseless carriages and the operation thereof, Michael Quinion (World Wide Words), in a discussion of people who struggle to find nouns, tells us of a driving lesson in the 1930's:
When it starts you push down on the doo-funny with your left foot, and yank the uptididdy back, then let up the foot dingus and put your other foot on the hickey-ma-doodle, don’t forget to push down on the hootananny every time you move the whatyoumaycallit and you’ll behunkydory. Gosh, dear, what’s the matter, haven’t you been listening to me? Centralia Daily Chronicle, 10 Jul. 1937.

FITNESS AND THE MIND
A few weeks ago we discussed going to gym and we showed you some of the motivations for overcoming our natural sloth (a deadly sin, FYI). We find the noisy music often played in the gym to be a royal pain in the butt, but it seems that to many people it is essential. In fact, in competition, a portable music player can be considered an illicit performance-enhancing device, Lord help us. We share with you an article from SciAm about the role of music in working out effectively. We once went to a gym that gave us classical music and it was great. Our present gym owner is a philistine and loudly declares her hatred for the classical genre. We have  resisted the awful boom-boom more or less successfully but it is an ongoing struggle. Perhaps if music were allowed on the track, we would not get scandals such as Tyson Gay testing positive. Yuck!

SMOKERS RAUS! 
More bans are falling on the tobacco industry in Europe and Pollyanna is very glad about it. Now menthol cigarettes are to be outlawed, because they are considered more attractive to younger people. Indoor bans and higher taxes are also making themselves felt although the black market is rising because of the higher taxes. The Wall Street Journal provides an interesting analysis of the tobacco market in Europe and its problems. We think the companies that purvey the junk are the problem.
TIDBITS FROM SCIENCE
WHY OUTSIDE? 
One of the questions of evolution that is asked by biologists and also by soccer goalies or rugby/football players is why, of all the organs of the body, our testicles are denied the protection of the bony skeleton that is given to kidneys, heart, pancreas and the rest. It was always thought that sperm production requires a temperature lower than 36.9C, but that is not obvious. In fact, the sperm making facility may well have adjusted to the out-of-body temperature after the expulsion.  Elephants reproduce quite well without an external scrotum. There is an interesting discussion of the topic in a recent online Slate and there seems to be no definite answer. Pollyanna would agree, if she dared to say it, that this is still an inscrotable question.

Showing off to the ladies is adaptive for some species

A vervet monkey's neon scrotum Courtesy of Gijs Joost Brouwer

and the ability to gallop(external testes are protected from abdominal stresses) helped us catch prey in the old days, but our reproductive plumbing is archaic, going back to the fish from which we evolved. To quote the writer, Liam Drew, who is a soccer goalie, "soccer goalkeepers should probably look to our baseball-playing friends who use evolution's gift of a large brain and opposable thumbs to don a protective cup." We note that players of US or Aussie rules football or Rugby abjure the cup because it impedes motion and is really only useful for the baseball catcher. It is amusing that a few years ago, a girl catcher on a Little League team in Florida was ordered to wear the cup to protect her putative scrotum. There was nationwide laughter and Nike and others sent along their protective padded panties for girl athletes.

A propos evolution, here are some goodies from a recent conference on evolutionary biology, including cheerful news

The first study of vision in diamondback terrapins finds the animals see a wider range of wavelengths than people do.

Jay Ondreicka/Shutterstock

about terrapin color vision,  island giantism and eye color distribution. We also note an interesting SciAm article about the evolution of complexity. Not all is simple and straightforward, which is good for science.

ASTRONOMY NEAR AND FAR 
The long predicted tail of the heliosphere, the bubble of space around our Sun, has been observed in data gathered by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, a satellite launched in 2008. The shape and size remain to be determined. On the other side of the scale, we are told of the detection of extragalactic radio waves, from 5 to 11 billion light years away. These are really ancient photons and can serve as probes of the plasma in intergalactic space. Pollyanna thinks that all this is really exciting.

OUR LITERARY CORNER
 This week Pollyanna wants to present  a novelist who for too long was denied the recognition that her work deserved. In a profile of Lionel Shriver in the New Yorker, Christine Smallwood gives us interesting insights into a philosophy of the people who do not quite make it, the near-successes that Shriver herself almost became. Pollyanna also would like to call your attention to a biography of Jane Franklin, the younger sister of Benjamin Franklin, written by the Harvard professor Jill Lepore. The book will be published by Knopf in October of this year. There is an autobiographical article about Lepore and her work in a recent New Yorker, but it is available only to subscribers to the print edition.

SILLY TIME 
What IF follows up the saga described on Titan's blog last week. XKCD drained all of Earth's oceans and sent them to Mars. He follows up with what happens on Mars. Poor Curiosity, just went to look for water! In the meantime, we can see how XKCD can get serious in his comments on social media, for example.

This one reminds us of questions on climate change, i.e. what warming? today is cold etc. from people who do not know the difference between weather and climate and, alas, are in decision-making positions.

THE END OF DUANE
First he approached Ms Foxx with that idiotic smirk:

and then the inevitable happened:

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