A Tuesday, July 31, 2012 photo, shows biblical scholar Professor Menachem Cohen, reading from a book, at the library of Bar Ilan University, outside Tel Aviv, Israel. For the past 30 years the 84-year-old Judaic biblical scholar has been immersed in a Sisyphean task of correcting all known errors in Jewish scripture to produce a definitive edition of the Hebrew Bible. Now, thanks to the internet, he's bringing it to the general public like never before with a sophisticated search engine that allows even novices to explore the holy text with ease.(AP Photo/Dan Balilty)
A Tuesday, July 31, 2012 photo, shows biblical scholar Professor Menachem Cohen, reading from a book, at the library of Bar Ilan University, outside Tel Aviv, Israel. For the past 30 years the 84-year-old Judaic biblical scholar has been immersed in a Sisyphean task of correcting all known errors in Jewish scripture to produce a definitive edition of the Hebrew Bible. Now, thanks to the internet, he's bringing it to the general public like never before with a sophisticated search engine that allows even novices to explore the holy text with ease.(AP Photo/Dan Balilty)
RAMAT GAN, Israel (AP) ? For the past 30 years, Israeli Judaic scholar Menachem Cohen has been on a mission of biblical proportions: Correcting all known textual errors in Jewish scripture to produce a truly definitive edition of the Old Testament.
His edits, focusing primarily on grammatical blemishes and an intricate set of biblical symbols, mark the first major overhaul of the Hebrew Bible in nearly 500 years.
Poring over thousands of medieval manuscripts, the 84-year-old Cohen identified 1,500 inaccuracies in the Hebrew language texts that have been corrected in his completed 21-volume set. The final chapter is set to be published next year.
The massive project highlights how Judaism venerates each tiny biblical calligraphic notation as a way of ensuring that communities around the world use precisely the same version of the holy book.
According to Jewish law, a Torah scroll is considered void if even a single letter is incorrect or misplaced. Cohen does not call for changes in the writing of the sacred Torah scrolls used in Jewish rites, which would likely set off a firestorm of objection and criticism. Instead, he is aiming for accuracy in versions used for study by the Hebrew-reading masses.
For the people of the book, Cohen said, there was no higher calling.
"The people of Israel took upon themselves, at least in theory, one version of the Bible, down to its last letter," Cohen said, in his office at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.
The last man to undertake the challenge was Jacob Ben-Hayim, who published the Mikraot Gedolot, or Great Scriptures, in Venice in 1525. His version, which unified the religion's varying texts and commentaries under a single umbrella, has remained the standard for generations, appearing to this day on bookshelves of observant Jews the world over.
Since Ben-Hayim had to rely on inferior manuscripts and commentaries, numerous inaccuracies crept in and were magnified in subsequent editions.
The errors have no bearing on the Bible's stories and alter nothing in its meaning. Instead, for example, in some places the markers used to denote vowels in Hebrew are incorrect; or a letter in a word may be wrong, often the result of a centuries old transcription error. Some of the fixes are in the notations used for cantillation, the text's ritual chants.
Most of the errors Cohen found were in the final two thirds of the Hebrew Bible and not in the sacred Torah scrolls, since they do not include vowel markings or cantillation notations.
Cohen said unity and accuracy were of particular importance to distinguish the sacred Jewish text from that used by those sects that broke away from Judaism, namely Christians and Samaritans.
To achieve his goal, Cohen relied primarily on the Aleppo Codex, the 1,000-year-old parchment text considered to be the most accurate copy of the Bible. For centuries it was guarded in a grotto in the great synagogue of Aleppo, Syria, out of reach of most scholars like Ben-Hayim. In 1947, a Syrian mob burned the synagogue, and the Codex briefly disappeared before most of it was smuggled into Israel a decade later.
Now digitized, the Codex, also known as the Crown, provided Cohen with a template from which to work. But because about a third of the Codex ? nearly 200 pages ? remains missing, Cohen had to recreate the five books of Moses based on trends he observed in the Codex as well as from other sources, such as the 11th-century Leningrad Codex, considered the second-most authoritative version of the Jewish Bible.
Cohen also included the most comprehensive commentaries available, most notably that of 11th-century Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, known as Rashi.
The result is the completion of Ben-Hayim's work.
"It was amazing to me that for 500 years, people didn't sense the errors," said Cohen, who wears a knitted skullcap and a gray goatee. "They just assumed that everything was fine, but in practice everything was not fine."
He's not the only scholar to devote decades to the task. In 1976, Rabbi Mordechai Breuer published a version of the Torah based mainly on the Aleppo Codex. The Hebrew University Bible Project in Jerusalem has also been working on a scientific edition of the Hebrew Bible, but theirs is directed toward scholars, while Cohen's output is aimed at wider consumption.
Rafael Zer, the project's editorial coordinator, called Cohen's work "quasi-scientific" because it presents a final product and does not provide the reader a way of seeing how it was reached. He credits Cohen for bringing an exact biblical text to the general public but said it "comes at the expense of absolute accuracy and an absolute scientific edition."
With the assistance of his son Shmuel, a computer programmer, Cohen launched a digital version he hopes will become a benchmark of the Israeli education system. He said his ultimate goal was to "correct the past and prepare for the future."
As a former teacher, Cohen said he took particular pride in a sophisticated search engine that allows even novices to explore his work with ease. He called computers a "third revolution" to affect Jewish scripture, following the shift from scrolls to bound books and the advent of the printing press.
"I want the Bible to be user-friendly," said Cohen, a grandfather of eight. "Today, we can create sources of information and searches that allow you to get an answer to everything you are wondering."
____
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ScienceDaily (Aug. 8, 2012) ? Climate change is causing a late wake-up call from hibernation for a species of Rocky Mountain ground squirrel and the effect is deadly.
A University of Alberta-led international research team examined data on a population of Columbian ground squirrels and found a trend of late spring snow falls has delayed the animals' emergence from hibernation by 10 days over the last 20 years.
U of A Evolutionary Ecologist Jeff Lane explained that Columbian ground squirrels are on a tight schedule; Females mate four days after emerging from hibernation. They give birth 24 days later. The newborns are nursed for 28 days, and then they're on their own.
"Losing just 10 days during their short active period reduces their opportunity to eat enough food so they can survive through the next hibernation period of eight to nine months," said Lane.
Research shows there's little wiggle room in the ground squirrel's life cycle. The period of plant growth, their food supply, is only three to four months long on their home turf, skirting the Rocky Mountains.
"Our data shows that over the life of the study, the survival rate of adult females has fallen by 20 per cent and much of this could be due to late emergence from their burrows brought on by late spring snowfalls, "said Lane. " The researchers say the study area's population has gone from one of growth 20 years ago to its current state of just maintaining population stability.
The study area is a 200-metre by 400-metre block in a sub-alpine meadow west of Calgary. Lane says the data was collected through observation and by trapping and releasing all the ground squirrels in the study area to monitor their condition. The study area was set up by U of A biologists in 1992. Lane began his hibernation study five years ago and collaborated with researchers in Scotland, France and the U of A. Lane was the lead researcher on the paper that was published August 8, in the online edition of the journal Nature.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/I5ntRppJTt4/120808132707.htm
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JOPLIN, Mo. (AP) ? Investigators say it will take a few days to determine if the fire that destroyed a southwest Missouri mosque was arson.
Michael Kaste, special agent in charge of the FBI's Kansas City office, said Monday that the agency is taking the investigation into the fire at the Islamic Society of Joplin very seriously. He says the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms together have about 30 investigators working to determine the cause.
No injuries were reported.
Jasper County officials say patrols at the mosque had been stepped up since a July 4 fire at the mosque was determined to be arson. The FBI has released a video of a man appearing to set the July 4 fire and is offering a $15,000 reward in that case.
Looking at the system requirements and reccomendations for the latest and greatest games, you?re going to see a trend for the CPU.
The trend is that gaming demands very little more from your CPU than it did half a decade ago. ?Requirements have had an overwhelming shift to the Video Card?s GPU as well as the RAM of both the computer as a whole and the Video Card itself.
So if you?ve bought a computer in the last half-decade, you probably have either a Dual-Core or a Quad-Core CPU with at least 2 GHz speed, therefore you?re pretty rock solid and don?t have to drop some cash there to play the latest titles.
If you?re not happy about your gaming performance or your gaming rig doesn?t have what it takes to run the latest bad ass FPS? this is what you need to do:
1. Max out your RAMBuy as much memory as your PC will take.
That?s 4GBs if your?e running a 32-bit system (hard limit for 32bit)? if you?re running a 64-bit rig, then I recommend between 8GB and 16GB at least.
2. Get The Best Video Card You Can AffordBuy the best video card that is within your budget.
The video card?s Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is where all the work is done for your latest games.
The more juice you have here, the better you?re going to be. ?You can spend anywhere from $70 all the way past $2,000. ?It?s up to you, but this where your investment should be going after you max out your RAM.
It?s really that simple. ?As long as you have a Dual or Quad Core CPU, then you know exactly where to focus to get your rig up to speed.
?
Source: http://www.airbornegamer.com/2012/08/06/top-2-powerful-ways-to-speed-up-your-gaming-pc/
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Overweight and obese individuals can achieve a decade's worth of important health benefits by losing just 20 pounds, even if they regain the weight later that decade, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association's 120th Annual Convention... [?]
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a potential target for treating diabetes and obesity. Studying mice, they found that when the target protein was disabled, the animals became more sensitive to insulin and were less likely to get fat even when they ate a high-fat diet that caused their littermates to become [?]
Results from a study conducted at Georgia State University suggest that a "fight" between bacteria normally living in the intestines and the immune system, kicked off by another type of bacteria, may be linked to two types of chronic disease... [?]
Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers have identified a mechanism that can give energy-storing white fat some of the beneficial characteristics of energy-burning brown fat. The findings, based on studies of mice and of human fat tissue, could lead to new strategies for treating obesity and type 2 diabetes. The study was published in the onlin [?]
Children undergoing liver transplantation are at greater risk of graft loss and death from adult organ donors who are severely obese according to research published in the August issue of Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases... [?]
In a Perspective article appearing in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, public health researchers examine how recommendations in a new report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) - "Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation" - square with American's opinions about the obesity epidemic... [?]
Despite the increasing awareness of the problem of obesity in the United States, most Americans don't know whether they are gaining or losing weight, according to new research from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington... [?]
Scientists have known for some time that throwing off the body's circadian rhythm can negatively affect body chemistry. In fact, workers whose sleep-wake cycles are disrupted by night shifts are more susceptible to chronic inflammatory diseases such as diabetes, obesity and cancer... [?]
Obesity is a worldwide health problem. According to estimations from a 2008 World Health Organization (WHO) report, 1.4 billion adults were overweight, including 200 million men and 300 million women classified as obese. A 2010 WHO report also states that over 40 million children under the age of five were overweight... [?]
A dramatic increase in childhood obesity in recent decades may have impacts that go beyond the usual health concerns - it could be disrupting the timing of puberty and ultimately lead to a diminished ability to reproduce, especially in females... [?]
More than 1.7 billion people worldwide may be classified as overweight and need appropriate medical or surgical treatment with the goal of sustainable weight loss... [?]
Men with large waists urinate more frequently than their slimmer counterparts, according to research in the August issue of the urology journal BJUI. Researchers from Weill Medical College, Cornell University, New York, found that men with waists measuring 100cm plus reported up to three times more urinary problems than men with waists of 90cm or less... [?]
New research in the FASEB Journal suggests that the neuropeptide Y in plasma and its Y2 receptor in visceral fat play an important role in obesity. A new report involving mice suggests that a relationship exists between maternal metabolic or psychological stress and the development of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic syndrome in her offspring... [?]
New research in the FASEB Journals demonstrates that blocking the delta opioid receptor in mice created resistance to weight gain and stimulated gene expression promoting non-shivering thermogenesis Imagine eating all of the sugar and fat that you want without gaining a pound. Thanks to new research published in The FASEB Journal, the day may come when this [?]
Think you know what one serving of food looks like? You may want to think again, according to a new study from York University... [?]
According to a study published in the journal Cell Metabolism, researchers have discovered that a new drug could assist in weight loss that stays away. The drug, which has so far, only been tested in mice, increases sensitivity to the hormone leptin, which is a natural appetite suppressant found in the body... [?]
Coaches have always had an important influence on improving athletic skills and guiding athletes to their greatest potential... [?]
Coaches can help athletes score touchdowns and perfect their golf swing, but can they also influence weight loss? Researchers from The Miriam Hospital's Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center say health coaches could play an important role in the battle of the bulge, according to the findings of a pilot study published online in the journal Obesity [?]
If doctors want to develop a strong rapport with parents of overweight children, it would be best if physicians used terms like "large" or "gaining too much weight" as opposed to the term "obese." These were findings recently published by medical researchers at the University of Alberta... [?]
Parents concerned about their children's slothful ways can do something about it, according to research at National Jewish Health. They can increase their own activity... [?]
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Tom Cruise and Suri cool off at the water park! Plus, see more photos of celebs spending time with their loved ones
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United States vs New Zealand, Women's Quarterfinals
The U.S. women's soccer team defeated New Zealand 2-0 on Friday to advance to the quarterfinals of the Olympic tournament.
Abby Wambach--> scored in the 27th minute for the U.S., which otherwise struggled to finish its chances.
New Zealand kept the game close until the 87th minute, when substitute Sydney Leroux--> scored the second goal for the U.S. just six minutes after checking into the game for Alex Morgan-->.
The U.S. advances to play either host Great Britain or North American rival Canada in the semifinal. France advanced to the semifinal earlier in the day with a 2-1 win over Sweden.
Sydney Leroux talks about being selected for the U.S. women's Olympic soccer team and what it means to her to break into the roster.
? 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source: http://www.nbcolympics.com/news-blogs/soccer/u-s-womens-soccer-team-defeats-new-zealand-2-0.html
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