Written and illustrated by Karen Gray Ruelle and Deborah Durland Desaix, The Grand Mosque of Paris is published by Holiday House Books for $17.95. Bouquets should be presented to the authors for the research they’ve done to bring such a beautiful historical moment to life. This book is living proof that Muslims and Jews lived as brothers in the past.

At forty pages long, and with illuminating illustrations on nearly every page, this is a fascinating read. It is set in 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, initiating World War II. Jews, the Nazis’ main victims, were in grave danger; they were being hunted down all over Europe. Many of them fled to France in the hopes of safety, but in 1940, the Nazis conquered France. A new French government of collaborators was set up, and as per the order of the Nazis, many anti-Jewish laws were passed. The new government rounded up Jews of all ages, mercilessly tortured them, and sent them to concentration camps, where millions died. Those Jews who were not captured began to seek shelter and refuge wherever they could. A large number of them found help in an extraordinary place: it was the Grand Mosque, the center of the Islamic Community in Paris, “… an oasis hidden behind high walls right in the middle of the city.”

The authors have projected the Mosque as both a place of great beauty and as a place of refuge and sanctuary, glorifying the Islamic principle of helping people in distress:

“The Grand Mosque shimmered like a mirage, the white dome and the glittering mosaics of the minaret in shark contrast to the mutated colors of Paris. When the mosque was built in 1926, the North African countries of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia were under French rule, and many Muslims had come to Paris from those countries. The land for the mosque was given by the French government in exchange for a symbolic payment of one franc, to thank the half million Muslim soldiers who had fought for France during the First World War.”

The mosque, with its graceful columns and arches, spacious courtyards, blooming gardens, and cascading fountains had a library full of rare manuscripts and books, steam baths, a clinic, and a restaurant. Everything that happened in the Muslim community – like births, marriages, and deaths – was duly recorded at the mosque.

This short book pays tribute to some notable persons who played dynamic roles in France and unflinchingly helped Jews – women and children young and old. There was Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the writer and diplomat who was in charge of the mosque. He kept the gates of the mosque open for Jews, housed and fed them, and kept them safe from persecution. In some cases, he even issued fake birth certificates to them to prove that they were Muslims. In one example, a young Jew from Algeria, Salim Halali, had a great desire to be a singer. In France, he was given protection in the mosque. Benghabrit secretly asked a stone carver to inscribe the family name on an unmarked tombstone in the Muslim cemetery, to convince the Nazis that Salim was a Muslim.

Another notable figure was Dr. Ahmed Somia, who cared for and protected the young children who were sick.

Besides these notable people, many unnamed Muslims in the French Resistance helped Jews to escape from Nazi-occupied Paris. Various means were adopted to disguise Jews. They were supplied with the Fez (a traditional tasseled wool felt hat) so that they could pass as Muslims. The Resistance also operated a secret network that smuggled Jews out of Paris to safety, sometimes through hidden tunnels under the basement of the mosque. These passageways twisted and turned beneath the streets for miles and miles until they reached the bank of River Seine, where Jews could then be transported to safe havens.

The authors, Ruelle and DeSaix, lament the fact that most important documents and manuscripts were either destroyed or lost during the Nazi invasion. After a long and laborious search, they could obtain only a few documents that threw light on the historical facts chronicled in the book. One letter, as the authors say, “… was recently found among the old papers of a Paris cafe owned by a Tunisian. The cafe owner said that it dated from World War II. It read:

Yesterday at dawn, the Jews of Paris were arrested. The elderly, the women, and the children. In exile like ourselves, workers like ourselves. They are our brothers. Their children are like our children. Anyone who encounters one of his children must give that child shelter and protection for as long as misfortune – or sorrow – lasts. Oh man of my country, your heart is generous.

Was this letter read out in the cafe? Did it circulate among the Kaybele workers of Paris, making its way through the crowded boardinghouses where these men lived? It certainly seems to be a call to action. Without a doubt, it is a recognition of the strong bond between North African Muslims and Jews.”

When World War II ended, Si Benghabrit kept on serving in the mosque as its rector until his death in 1954. He was buried by the mosque. Jewish singer Salim Halali lived a long, successful life, and is revered as the father of modern North African song. Dr. Ahmed Somia continued his selfless devotion to the sick until his death.

The Grand Mosque of Paris, written in simple English, is a book that must be cherished. One cannot help but feel it could have been better if descriptions of the incidents and the works of the people mentioned in the book were in greater detail. Yet, it is a book designed for children, so the authors wanted to keep the level good enough for the aimed age group.

I first came across his ideas in the 70s, through a book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970), by two American authors, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder.

Reflecting somewhat the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, the authors were exploring psychic matters and occultism, and for that purpose they visited Soviet Russia, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968. As described in the back cover, “they reveal astonishing breakthroughs and key personalities spearheading exploration of man’s unknown powers” in laboratories from Prague to Moscow.

One place they stopped was the Pulkovo Observatory near St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), “the principal observatory of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the timekeeping Greenwich of Russia” (today The Central Astronomical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences) to meet Dr. Kozyrev. They were going there to discuss “an amazing theory of time” developed by Kozyrev, whom the authors described as “one of the Soviet Union’s most renowned astrophysicists” (p. 157).

Kozyrev does deserve this praise, as he was only 17 when he published his first scientific paper. When he graduated in physics and mathematics from the University of Leningrad, he was only twenty. And by the age of twenty-eight, he had already won distinction as an astronomer and had taught at several colleges (p. 158).

He was brimming with new ideas and life was as good as he could possibly have wished it to be. Then the ax fell. In 1936 he was arrested in the Stalinists repressions and in 1937 he began eleven crushing years in a prison camp. … When he was at last rehabilitated and could return to astronomy, Kozyrev made a series of brilliant predictions about the Moon, Venus, and Mars. Much later, Soviet space probes proved him right. (p. 158)

Like many other geniuses throughout world history, his announcements were received with skepticism in the beginning. In 1958, for instance, he announced volcanic activity on the moon, which meant that there were vast natural resources to exploit. Scientists “classified him as an eccentric hunting for gas on the moon. They knew this was not possible.” But he was proven right when Dr. Harold Urey, a U.S. Nobel Prize winner, talked with him and NASA started the enormous “Moon Blink” project. Eventually, gas emissions were found on the moon.

Kozyrev was proposing a new theory when he said, “Time is a form of energy. It is to time’s properties that we should look in order to find the source that maintains the phenomenon of life in the world.” With all credit to his other findings, this theory on time may sound completely irrelevant and without basis to scientists today; but as mentioned in the beginning, the purpose of this review is not to confirm his theory, but to open up a long forgotten gateway for researchers studying time and ether.

Although approached with suspicion today, parapsychology studies peaked in the eastern bloc in the 1960s, which was the main reason the two American authors felt the need to travel overseas and spend three years researching their 450-page book. “Parapsychology, nonexistent just a decade before, was suddenly flourishing all over the USSR,” they wrote. When the authors looked beyond Iron Curtain politics, “behind the lace curtains of everyday Russia,” they began to come across “some very unusual material about life.”

“Soviet scientists were asking publicly, ‘What is man?’ Do we have unused, undreamed of potentials? Can parapsychology melt the barriers and create the supernormal human being? These were heady questions to read in Soviet publications.”

In 1966, the authors noted, the influential journal Science and Religion put out a special issue, No. 3, on current Russian telepathy research. Outstanding Soviets, including such notables as Dr. Nikolai Semyonov, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and Vice President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, called for further scientific investigations of telepathy. It was in this time and context when Kozyrev’s research intensified and his speculative theory came into a form.

The authors noted that, according to some Soviet scientists (p. 159), ESP (extrasensory perception) “may involve an unknown form of energy,” which Kozyrev called “time,” in the telepathic transfer of “thought” instantly from one person to another.

“Time is the most important and most enigmatic property of nature. Time is not propagated like light waves; it appears immediately everywhere. The altered properties of a certain second of time will appear instantly everywhere at once, just as time is everywhere. Time links us all and all things in the universe,” Dr. Kozyrev told the authors in his high-ceilinged office at Pulkovo. The authors noted the following from their interview with Kozyrev:

Kozyrev’s “time” has a number of properties which he says can be studied in the scientist’s lab. He has found, for instance, that this “X” energy, or “time,” is denser near the receiver of an action and thinner near the sender. He showed us some of the instruments he has devised to chart this unusual effect. The basic equipment includes precision gyroscopes, asymmetrical pendulums, and torsion balances. The instruments, when set up in a complex arrangement, react showing a change in time density near a mechanical action (like stretching elastic) or a chemical action (like burning sugar).

This is the gist of what happens in one of the more simple experiments: a long elastic is stretched by a machine. You can think of this elastic as having two poles. The “pull” or cause end and the “stretch” or effect end. When the elastic is stretched, the registering equipment, consisting mainly of an asymmetrical pendulum made with a gyroscope, arcs toward the effect pole of the elastic. This deflection is imperceptible to the eye, but easily registered on the sensitive instruments. It is a highly important effect. It shows there has been an increase in the intensity of time, according to Dr. Kozyrev. “This has nothing to do with force fields. We shielded and calculated out any possible influence of electrostatic or any other force.” Considering Kozyrev’s rarified caliber as a scientist, he probably knows what he is talking about.

Kozyrev’s instruments also showed a thinning of time near the “cause” end of the elastic, and this was possible even when the “cause-effect” equipment was shielded by a wall one yard thick: “It reacts even through iron tubes.” Chemical cause-effect, like burning sugar, also showed the change in time density. “We postulate,” Dr. Kozyrev said, “that time is thin around the cause and dense around the effect.”

According to the authors, “what Dr. Kozyrev has found in these tests can be called PK (psychokinesis),” for the chemical events acted on the gyroscope pendulum at a distance and without the use of any known force. Dr. Kozyrev would say that “time density” brought on this startling action at a distance. PK is usually considered not as matter affecting matter from a distance, but as a mind affecting matter. The authors asked Kozyrev whether thought might have any effect on this time density. “Yes,” Dr. Kozyrev replied. “Thought definitely affects the reaction. When I purposefully think of poetry or something emotional during the test, the equipment registers more of a change than when I think of mathematical calculations. Our thoughts may change the density of time.”

“Would the density of time, then, have something to do with telepathy?” asked the authors.

“Telepathy always depends on the density of time. Time would be thin near the sender of the thought and denser around the receiver. We’ve already done tests in our lab to try to artificially change the density of time. When we can make time dense at will, we can make telepathy happen when we want it,” Dr. Kozyrev feels.

What else affects the density of time? Thunderstorms, the weather, the change of season, the activity of growing things, gravity, and density of matter have an effect on time density, which lingers longer in some substances than in others. “It remains twice as long in aluminum as in lead and five times longer in wood than in lead” (p. 162).

Another characteristic of the energy Kozyrev called “time” is that it has a flow pattern, according to his findings:

Dr. Kozyrev thought about all living organisms-animals, plants, people. Our right and left sides are not mirror images. More of the heart is on the left than the right side. Microbes produce colonies of a spiral structure. Protoplasm, the basic building block of life, is not symmetrical either. Asymmetry is a basic property of life. This can’t be a chance thing, Dr. Kozyrev thought. … Perhaps the energy of “time” flows in this pattern. If so, Dr. Kozyrev figured, he could see it and measure it in a rotating body like a gyroscope. Altering the time pattern in a rotating system should add or subtract energy.

After years of careful experiments, Dr. Kozyrev and his colleagues found that in a left-hand rotating system the time flow is positive-it adds energy. In a right-hand system the time flow is negative. … In Dr. Kozyrev’s view our world is a left-hand system and it has a positive time flow that adds energy to our universe.

Time not only has a pattern of flow, says Dr. Kozyrev, but also a rate of flow. He calls “the rate of flow” the difference between cause and effect. “As the rate of the time flow through a substance changes, weight is lost,” Dr. Kozyrev told us. “It means that ‘levitation’ is a perfectly practical possibility.” (p. 163)

Time or ether?

Time is not matter. According to Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, “time is like an aspect or a ‘ribbon’ of motion” (The Thirty-First Word, p. 591). That is, time is not possible without motion. I argue that what Kozyrev thought he discovered was not time, but perhaps had to with what is called ether, an element which is assumed by some cosmologists to be the essence of all existence, but which is also disregarded by many scientists today. Bediuzzaman is one of those scholars who referenced ether in his work. In his partial Qur’anic exegesis, The Sign of Miraculousness (Isharat al-I’jaz first published in 1914), Bediuzzaman explained the verse (Hud 11:7) as follows:

… the verse “the heavens and the earth were at first one piece, and then We parted them as separate entities”(21:30) indicates that the earth and the solar system were a sort of dough kneaded by the hand of power out of a simple substance; I mean ether, which compared with beings is a fluid substance that passes through and among them. The verse “His Supreme Throne was upon the water”(11:7) alludes to this matter, which resembles water. After its creation, the ether received the Maker’s first manifestation giving existence; that is, He created the ether, then He made it into the subatomic particles (jawâhir farda) … (Isharat al-I’jaz, pp. 254)

For Bediuzzaman, ether was something like an interface upon which all acts of God were displayed:

… being an extremely subtle, fine, obedient and subjugated page for the All-Majestic Maker’s acts, being a means for the transmission of His commands, being an extremely delicate veil for the execution of His decrees, being refined ink for His writing, being a finest raiment to clothe His acts of creation, being a fundamental component in His artifacts and a field in which to sow His seeds, ether acts as a mirror for the manifestations of the Lordship of God. (The Thirtieth Gleam, p. 477)

Bediuzzaman also referred to “ether” when he said “refined matter” in the following quote: “Such subtle and refined matters as light, electricity, and heat point to the existence of a more subtle and refined matter that fills space” (The ThirtyFirst Word, p. 589).

The observations and findings of Kozyrev, though in desperate need of endorsement by objective scientific criteria, sound, from how the American authors revealed in their interview, as if referring to this mysterious subtle matter called “ether” rather than “time.”

Conclusion

The authors of this once popular book wrote in the Prologue that they “would have to be megalomaniacs to think that scores of highly reputable scientists from centers across the Soviet Union and the satellite countries all conspired to publish data for a decade and to bluff through interviews” to impress them when they happened to meet them. The authors further noted that “whether communist observations and theories about psychic happenings are right or not, can only be determined by further investigations East and West.”

Let us conclude with the following quote from the Prologue: “As Vladimir Mutshall wrote of current Soviet telepathy research in the American Foreign Science bulletin, Vol. 4, No. 8, ‘If the Russian reports are even partly true, and if mind-to-mind thought transference can be used for such things as interplanetary communications or the guiding of interplanetary spacecraft, the reports will obviously have overwhelming significance.'”

The main reason I have extensively quoted from this book is not to confirm any of the findings, but to encourage scientists to conduct further research into the essence of matter without completely disregarding phenomena like ether.

Original article: Czupryn, A. et al., Science 334, 1133 (2011).

Neurons are a highly specialized group of cells that transmit electrical stimuli to elicit responses in the body. This high specialization comes with a price: with few exceptions, neurons cannot divide to replace nonfunctional ones. Over the past decade, cell therapy, that is treatment of a disease by introducing new cells, has emerged as a new hope for neurological disorders such as spinal cord injury, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease, albeit with numerous challenges. One of the major problems in the field is to make the newly-introduced cells integrate into the neural circuitry of the host organism. This proof-of-concept study showed that it is possible for transplanted neurons to functionally integrate into the host brain and cure obesity in a specific genetic mouse model. This genetic mouse model lacks the ability to sense leptin, a hormone that regulates body weight and metabolism. Thus, these mice are prone to obesity and diabetes. The authors transplanted progenitor neurons isolated from the hypothalamus-a part of the brain that regulates numerous functions including metabolism, hunger and body temperature-of normal embryonic mice to the hypothalami of newborn diseased mice. Twenty weeks after the transplantation, cells were shown to be functionally integrated into the native circuitry. Integrated neurons were able to create electrical stimuli, transmit signals and, unlike the native neurons, respond to the hormone, leptin. Amazingly, transplanted mice were 30% lower in body weight and diabetes-free compared to the obese non-transplanted counterparts. The results were dramatic, despite the fact that only a few of the transplanted neurons were actually converted to the neurons that play a role in energy metabolism and leptin response. The authors explain this phenomenon by stating that the transplanted neurons may work as “antennas” to sense leptin and regulate other neurons in the native circuitry. Although current research is far from human application, it is still an important step towards treatment of detrimental neurological diseases.

2- A new record in solar cell efficiency

Original Article: Yella, A. et al., Science 334, 629 (2011).

Since their discovery in 1991, dye-sensitized solar cells (also known as Grätzel cells) have offered great potential despite their low efficiency values. They consist of dye-soaked titania nanoparticles coupled to an iodide-based electrolyte that allows for absorption of light and its conversion to electricity through the fast transport of electrons. According to a report in Science, researchers from ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have substantially improved the efficiency values over 12%, making this type of solar cells a feasible contender to the incumbent silicon solar cells. To store the most sunlight, these cells absorb the colors of the light spectrum with the highest energies and reject the rest such as the green light. In addition to the increase in cell efficiency, Grätzel and coworkers have also reduced their cost by replacing expensive ruthenium dyes with a zinc-based dye. Finally, they have improved the voltage output by using a cobalt electrolyte, a redox system that is more compatible than the previous iodide systems. This new system with improved components has also increased the theoretical maximum efficiency to 30%, which will require further optimization in device design and engineering to achieve. The only major drawback is the use of organic solvents potentially limiting the efforts for large-scale fabrication.

3- IQ can still change in teenage years

Original Article: Ramsden S. et al., Nature 479, 113 (2011).

Intelligence quotient (IQ) is a standardized measure of human intellectual capacity that takes into account a wide range of cognitive skills. IQ is generally considered to be stable across the lifespan, with scores at one time point being used to predict educational achievement and employment prospects in later years. However Prof. Cathy Price and colleagues have found that verbal and non-verbal IQ can rise or fall in the teenage years. They tested 33 teenagers-19 boys and 14 girls-in 2004, when they were 12 to 16 years old, and again in 2008, when they were 16 to 20 years old. Each time, the teens took IQ tests that measured their verbal and nonverbal abilities. Then, using magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers scanned the teenagers’ brains while they performed verbal tasks, such as reading or naming objects, and nonverbal tasks, such as solving visual puzzles with their hands. The idea was to match their test scores with a picture of their brain structure and activity at each time. The test results revealed dramatic changes between their first testing and their second: verbal and nonverbal IQ scores of participants rose or fell by as many as 20 points (on a scale with an average score of 100). Some teens improved or declined in either their verbal or nonverbal skills, while others improved in one area and declined in the other. The brain scans mirrored the score differences. For example, in teens whose verbal IQ scores had increased, the scans showed increased gray matter density in a region of the brain activated by speech. Teens whose nonverbal skills had improved showed changes in a brain region associated with motor movements of the hand. The authors note that these were the largest changes observed, and that there might be many more that were not noticed.

4- A coordination path from an infant’s heart to the mother’s heart

Original Article: Feldman, R. et al., Infant Behavior and Development 34, 569 (2011).

A group of researchers sat 40 pairs of mothers and 3-month-old infants face-to-face, equipped with sticky skin electrodes on either side of their hearts. Beat for beat, mother and child’s hearts thumped together almost instantly as they shared loving looks or contented coos. This cardiac coupling worked only for moms with their own babies, and only when the duos synchronized smiles and other cheerful social behaviors. The researchers suspect that when humans mirror each other’s facial expressions, they may switch on specific areas in the brain that tell the heart when to thump. Melding with mom lasts longer than just a few beats, however. Babies who don’t tune in with their mothers are less empathetic as teenagers, according to previous work from the same group. Premature infants or those whose mothers have postpartum depression may be most at risk for losing this social skill because they miss out on early opportunities to interact with their mothers. The authors state that future research is required to examine the impact of interaction synchrony on other physiological processes, such as hormonal release or brain activation.