Category: Science and Health

Today’s daf tells us the story of a remarkable woman named Kimchit:  The sages taught: Kimchit had seven sons, and they all served in the office of the high priesthood. The sages said to her: What good deeds did you perform to merit this? She said to them: In all my days, the beams of […]

The Health Ministry is expected to announce its decision next week, Head of Public Health Sharon Alroy-Preis told Army Radio. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said earlier this month that children as young as 12 could get the jab. Some 49% of the general public said they would bring their children to be […]

If you walk into a synagogue today, you’ll find a light burning in front of the ark. This light, the ner tamid (literally: “eternal light”), has come to symbolize God’s eternal presence in sacred spaces. The practice is derived from a number of biblical sources, including Leviticus 6:6, which mandates that a fire be kept burning on the […]

Winston Churchill is said to have said: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. “   Parshat Beha’alotcha is a Torah portion of both difficulty and opportunity. Here’s the sequence of events in this portion. 1. The Levites prepare for service in the Tabernacle.  2. The commandment […]

Pfizer administered the first set of jabs to volunteers of a new study of subjects 65 and older, exploring the co-administration of the company’s 20-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (20vPnC) candidate when followed by a booster shot of Pfizer’s current COVID-19 vaccine, the company said on Monday.The 20vPnC vaccine candidate is currently in development to prevent […]

Tashlich is a Jewish ritual, dating to the Middle Ages, that involves tossing bread into a live body of water between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The bread symbolizes a person’s sins, and the water is meant to wash them away. This practice has spawned a whole genre of contemporary jokes. What do you toss into […]

A massive global scientific collaboration has been launched to help crack the secrets of how whales communicate with one another, and maybe see if humans can understand it. Known as the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI), the program is a massive collaborative effort between research institutions all over the world, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology […]

When is a “man” not necessarily a man? When we’re on page 43 of Tractate Yoma, among many, many other places. Traditional Hebrew, like many languages, is locked into a gender binary. People, objects, concepts, even verbs and adjectives, are linguistically either masculine or feminine, often in unpredictable ways. Why is “chair” masculine and “conversation” feminine? […]

 A natural plant-derived food supplement could possibly be used to help reduce anxiety, a new study from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science has found. The substance, beta-sitosterol, was shown in the study to reduce anxiety in mice, and was found to produce this effect both by itself and in synergic combination with the antidepressant Prozac. […]

  A new type of coronavirus believed to have originated in dogs was detected among patients hospitalized with pneumonia in 2017-2018, and may be the eighth unique coronavirus known to cause disease in humans if it is confirmed as a pathogen, a study said. Researchers in the study, published in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal […]