Category: Science and Health

Welcome to Tractate Sotah, in which we will explore a singular ritual by which a man who suspects his wife of adultery can put her to a supernatural test that will prove her guilt or innocence.  According to the Torah, a man who suspects his wife of infidelity, or is even so overcome with jealousy […]

If you have had a loved one who died while in hospice care, you may have received the same little booklets I did with words of encouragement for the journey through grief. As I began to peruse the first one, I was prepared to dismiss it as a collection of irrelevant platitudes. Instead, page after […]

Many people would be happy to skip the first few hours of the day and skip straight to the stage where they feel awake and that they can function normally.  Currently, most of us are used to having a tough time getting into the day and don’t think it’s possible to change our morning attitude. […]

A four-year-old girl named Ayla who lives in the West Bank town of Kalkilya suffered during the past year from repeated brain events that caused paralysis and life-threatening symptoms. No hospitals in the territories were able to diagnose her condition correctly. Suddenly, her condition continued to deteriorate, and she suffered a stroke – a rare […]

Many parents ask themselves when their baby’s first step will be and are ready to record everything in an exciting video that will become a sweet memory.  The answer is very general, and the accepted range is between one year to 18 months, but some babies will walk earlier, some later. Even if it seems […]

Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center (SZMC) has begun a first-of-its-kind pilot in the world of giving an injection to reduce the risk of breast cancer. When the results are compiled, the treatment could provide an alternative to the prophylactic mastectomy procedure that women carrying the BRCA1 gene mutation are required to undergo.  Women diagnosed as […]

A new study published in the journal PLOS One has shown that nearly one in five people in the UK suffer from misophonia – an auditory sensitivity or auditory disorder defined as “hatred of noise.” The researchers gave 772 participants a questionnaire according to which they could understand the intensity and complexity of misophonia while […]

There are an estimated 200 Israelis suffering from childhood onset schizophrenia (COS) – a severe and rare form of the psychiatric disorder that emerges before the age of 13. The role of genetics in schizophrenia is significant and widely studied in the common form of the disease that appears in adolescence or early adulthood, but […]

From the villages of Eastern Europe comes an old, classic joke. Shmuel comes in the door with a sad face, telling Esther that the Czar has decreed that every Jew must convert and become Christian. “What shall we do?” cries Esther. “I don’t think we have a choice,” laments Shmuel, “we have to convert.”  The next day Shmuel […]