Subway Poles/Snakes on Poles
Subway riders in standing room-only cars try not to think too much about what organisms might be happily residing on the poles they grasp during the lurching trip. To obtain some hard data, Harvard...
Category: Science
Hubris Heights
Three years ago, geneticists Drs. Stephen Friend, Eric Schadt and Jason Bobe set out to search international databases for people who were over 30 and healthy but who carried mutations that typically cause childhood...
Happy Meals, Jewish Style
There’s something – and something Jewish, as it happens – to be said for willfully denying ourselves foods, at least at times. An article I wrote for the excellent site simpletoremember.com, about eating Jewishly,...
Buried Treasure in Tokyo
At a news conference last week, Satoshi Omura, a Japanese researcher and one of three scientists who had just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, made a comment that was not only...
Clear Lens, Clear Image
I hadn’t planned to awaken at 3 a.m. on Wednesday night, even though it was the peak time for catching sight of meteors – commonly called “shooting stars” – born of the earth’s yearly...
Spaced Out
“Are we alone?” asked the oversized headline of a full page ad in the New York Times last Tuesday. “Now is the time to find out,” it answered itself. The open letter that followed...
Recent Articles on Two Different Kinds of Evolution
A piece I wrote in response to a a review of Marc Shapiro’s most recent book (and, to an extent, to the book itself) can be read here. And one about my personal reluctance...
Yale Scientists’ Interesting Conclusion
Interesting news reported this morning about a team of Yale paleontologists who applied a set of algorithms to genetic and morphological data and concluded that the ancestor of living snakes had hind legs, complete...
Anybody Out There?
A mere week after NASA scientists announced their certainty of finding life on other planets within the next 20 years, a team of other scientists announced that, after searching 100,000 galaxies, they have found...
When I Drifted Off the Path
A piece I wrote for the Forward about my short-lived disillusionment with Judaism when I was 12 years old can be read here.
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