english articles Shopping for your country Written by Gil Yaron    Monday, 03 August 2009 Shopping for your country During the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising, Nablus was known as the “Capital of Terror.” Armed gangs controlled the city’s streets and sent suicide bombers into Israel. The Israeli army conducted incursions every night. Nine years after chaos and war owned its streets, Nablus has returned to its former role as the economic engine of the West Bank. Nowadays, citizens are encouraged to shop, not fight their way out of occupation. Terror has given way to a cautious air of normalcy, but nobody knows how long the lull will last. © 2008 Gil Yaron - Making the Middle East Understandable   Squaring the circle Written by Gil Yaron    Sunday, 14 June 2009 Squaring the circle It seemed like an impossible task. With his highly anticipated programmatic speech, Israel's Premier Benjamin Netanyahu was attempting to square the circle: On the one hand, he had to mollify his country's most important ally, the United States. Washington had been growing increasingly impatient with Netanyahu's refusal to accept a two-state solution and his unwillingness to freeze settlement construction in the West Bank. On the other hand, he could not venture too much, lest he alienate his right-wing coalition partners and endanger a coalition that to some seemed fragile anyway. Examined within these parameters, Netanyahu's cautious speech seems to have been a success. © 2008 Gil Yaron - Making the Middle East Understandable   Perfume from the computer Written by Gil Yaron    Tuesday, 04 August 2009 Perfume from the computer It is our oldest and most primitive sense, but also the least predictable one. While physicists and physiologists can easily explain the way our ears and eyes function, they are at a loss when it comes to our noses. Smells are so difficult to describe that researchers of olfaction face an immense challenge simply to find a standardize language to describe their object of interest. Quantifiable objective measurements of smells do not exist. There is a clear correlation between the wavelength of light and its color or the frequency of a sound and its pitch. No one knows, however, why a foul egg stinks or a rose smells so nice. So far, no link has been discovered between the molecular structure of a substance and its smell. The mechanism by which we perceive and interpret smell has therefore remained one of the largest mysteries of the human body. A team at Israel's Weizmann Institute now claims to have solved the mystery. Using a mathematical model, they have succeeded in predicting the smell of newly created substances, a first in the history of olfactory research. © 2008 Gil Yaron - Making the Middle East Understandable   Out of Africa Written by Gil Yaron    Saturday, 01 August 2009 Out of Africa Have you ever forgotten a cucumber in your fridge only to discover an unidentifiable object in the bottom drawer weeks later? You probably never thought that this mess might some day help scientists gain important insights into our daily lives. But in fact, the prestigious journal “Science” has now published a report by seven Israeli scientists who have been sifting through an ancient “fridge,” of sorts - an archeological dig at Gesher Bnot Yaacov (GBY), next to the Jordan River in northern Galilee. In their publication they claim to have found the oldest hearth outside Africa. The ancient leftovers all around the site may offer clues to our ancestors' lives.   © 2008 Gil Yaron - Making the Middle East Understandable

© 2010 Gil Yaron - Making the Middle East Understandable