Issue 146 (Mar - Apr 2022)

Video games have become a part of our lives. It used to be kids only who spent hours playing, but those kids have become parents and many of them continue to play. Faster internet and rapidly growing computer technologies have made video games easily accessible, which means they are here to stay wi…

Thinking of the heavenly days … Days promised by the Prophets and dreamed of by the saints… Days testified by the truthful witnesses of the sun rising…Thinking of those days with full confidence in the eternal power of the Sublime Creator, we imagine a future with its true colors and form. Our ho…

We are born with physical bodies, we live in these bodies, and eventually, we bid farewell to this world, leaving our bodies behind. Our bodies are entrusted to us, and we have to know how to safeguard these trusts, as well as the consequences, both in this world and the other, of breaching this tr…

Video games have exploded in popularity since their inception in the 1970s and are now a permanent part of the entertainment industry. The marriage of video games and the internet in the 1990s brought the advent of online gaming, which can be played with both friends and strangers alike. Online gam…

Spices, generally used for seasoning foods, can also be used for killing microbes. As people opt for foods that are less processed—and may even contain no chemical additives—the protective value of spices has increased. In addition, the use of spices in foods has become more prevalent thanks to res…

One of the reasons for widespread Islamophobia is the wrong understanding of the Qur’an, Islam’s Holy Book. There is a general perception that the Qur’an contains references to war and violence, inciting Muslims to take up arms against non-Muslims. Ironically, most people who criticize the Qur’an a…

When someone has a headache, they take a pain reliever; usually, the pain soon goes away. If a child has a fever, its parents will give them an antipyretic to reduce the fever. How do these drugs work? What effects do they have on the body? In the previous issue of The Fountain, we covered Pharmaco…

According to people of the heart, mujahada (striving) means doing what is required by having been endowed with will-power. It includes struggling against the car­nal soul and seeking ways to defeat it, always preferring to fulfill the religious obligations without neglecting even the secondary ones…

On my sixteenth birthday, my mother gave me a leather-bound journal with my name embossed in gold on the front cover. I stared blankly at the blank pages with pale pinstripe lines traveling end to end, crowned with a fleur-de-lis watermark.  I sat in my oversized wicker butterfly chair, my legs cr…

Sometimes unexpected things happen to us in life. We encounter situations that have almost no place in probability calculations. It’s like when the evil Star Wars character Darth Vader declares to the heroic Luke Skywalker, “I am your father.” The revelation is unexpected, and audiences are surpris…

As an instructor of statistics, I sometimes cannot help but explain the phenomena of the social sciences through mathematical expressions. This is especially true when there is almost complete correspondence between the two. One such topic is the “powers” of ignorance. When I say “powers,” I obviou…

In the United States, immigrants often face a crisis of identity that is familiar to many who live abroad. This crisis can be thought of as a struggle between the desire for cultural integration and the fear of cultural assimilation. On the one hand, immigrants usually come to a new country because…

Question: It is stated that practicing religion is easy, but to many it doesn’t appear to be so. Can you please explain this apparent contradiction? Ease and difficulty are relative concepts. It differs in accordance with personal perception and understandings. With the influence of one’s habitual…

Insulin-secreting pancreatic beta cells generated from stem cells Balboa et al. Functional, metabolic and transcriptional maturation of human pancreatic islets derived from stem cells. Nature Biotechnology, March 2022. Produced in pancreatic beta cells, insulin is a key hormone with a duty to reg…