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What’s in a name?

When I was growing up, my dad (who was nominally Jewish) told me that our family name was German and meant Iron Mountain. I only learned decades later that both of his parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. At the time my paternal grandfather arrived in New York as a child, the name was spelled “Aizenberg.” He grew up in Argentina, and when he returned to the US, had the name spelled in its current form, doubling the s to capture the soft s sound. Because my mom was Roman Catholic, my parents had to agree to raise their kids Roman Catholic in ordered to be married in the Church. Which is why I’ve had five of the seven RCC sacraments, how I came to be an altar boy at St. Mary Catholic Church, why the boy scout troop I was in was sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, and how the first date for my wife and I was an ice skating party sponsored by the CYO. While I no longer identify as Catholic, I also don’t identify as Jewish, even though Israel would consider me Jewish for the right...
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Advances in cancer diagnosis

We’re used to thinking about DNA in containers: nuclei, mitochondria, bacteria, viral particles. But there’s lots of DNA pieces flowing through our bloodstream all the time. This cell-free DNA can be captured and analyzed, just like the DNA in sewerage can be tested for COVID. “UCLA scientists have developed a simple and cost-effective blood test that, in early studies, shows promise in detecting multiple cancers, various liver conditions and organ abnormalities simultaneously by analyzing DNA fragments circulating in the bloodstream.  “The test, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could offer a powerful and more affordable approach to early disease detection and comprehensive health monitoring. “Early detection is crucial,” said Dr. Jasmine Zhou, the study’s senior author, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and investigator at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Survival rates are far higher when cancers are cau...
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The laws of physics haven’t been repealed by AI

You may have read about how a colonel was rescued deep inside Iran using a technology dubbed “ghost murmer.” Great marketing, bad physics. “ By Tuesday, the New York Post reported that the CIA had deployed Ghost Murmur, a device that uses vaguely described “long-range quantum magnetometry” to find signals of human heartbeats, after which artificial intelligence software isolates each heartbeat from the noisy data. ” This is just BS on stilts. “ It’s a terrific story. It is also, according to scientists who study magnetic fields, almost certainly not true. The rescue was real—the mission involved multiple aircraft and a survival beacon carried by the airman—but Ghost Murmur, at least as publicly described, finds no support in decades of peer-reviewed physics, even with the help of AI, experts told me. “Quantum magnetometers are real; they are ultraprecise at, for instance, detecting heart arrhythmias by measuring magnetic fields (via quantum properties) produced by the cardiac muscle. T...
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Was Jesus the result of parthenogenesis?

In a resurrected recording of one of his lectures, Christopher Hitchens says that he cannot definitively rule out that the virgin birth of Jesus was the result of parthenogenesis, since parthenogenesis has been observed in other animals*. Here’s the thing, though. The Y chromosome is sex-determining in humans. If Mary had a child by parthenogenesis, it would have to be female, since Mary carries no Y chromosome. So, it would be impossible for Jesus to be the result of parthenogenesis. *for example,   Drosophila mercatorum   can reproduce by facultative parthenogenesis  
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Quote of the day

Because antisemitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny, fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity and civilization, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason . . . ~Christopher Hitchens
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America is abandoning science

I came of age near the end of the golden age of science. Stampeded by Sputnik, America revised its science curriculum in the early 1960s and I was a beneficiary. As a PhD student, I was supported for three years on an NIH training grant, and as a postdoc, I was supported for three years on an NIH fellowship. I got my first NIH grant in my second year as an assistant professor. But by then, federal funding had already declined in real terms. By 1989, a Nobel Laureate molecular biologist at MIT wrote in a major journal that NIH funding criteria had taken on a “mask of madness.” In his 2026 budget proposal, Trump proposed major cuts to federal science funding which were mostly ignored by Congress. Now, Trump is proposing to slash American science again, while meanwhile attacking the immigrant labor force that has been fueling science in America. “ In recent years, various metrics have called into question America’s supremacy in science and technology. For example, the Australian Strategic...
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Will Iran go nuclear?

Until now, Iran has eschewed the manufacture of nuclear weapons, ostensibly based on a fatwa by Ayatollah Ali Khameni. Since Khameni’s assassination by Israel and his replacement by his son, it’s not clear that Iran will continue to observe that fatwa. “ What gives Khamenei’s death a particular doctrinal significance is that he had, over more than two decades,   publicly   framed weapons of mass destruction—including nuclear and chemical weapons—as contrary to Islam. If that position represented a genuine religious constraint rather than mere diplomatic rhetoric, then his death may have removed more than a leader: it may have weakened the doctrinal restraint that helped keep Iran a threshold nuclear state.”  The elective war on Iran by the US and Israel has underscored the importance of the North Korean nuclear breakout. I’d be very surprised if Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon in the next couple of years. Trump, Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia and the UAW would be to blame. ht...
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