jhalper | February 16, 2012
At age 28, theoretical physicist Dr. Zohar Komargodski became head of a research group in the Institute's Particle Physics and Astrophysics Department. A recent paper, published with Prof. Adam Schwimmer of the Physics of Complex Systems Department, made some waves in the physics world with a proposed proof of a 23-year-old theorem. If the proof stands, it will have implications for many fields, including the analysis of LHC results and supersymmetry. Komargodski and Schwimmer claim they had been kicking around various ideas for a proof for several years before the solution came to them -…
jhalper | January 15, 2012YEDA Research and Development Company LTD., the commercial arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science, today announced it has entered into a license agreement with Adobe Systems Incorporated related to a bidirectional similarity measure to summarize visual data.
Here are some examples:
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For more information, see our press release or Prof. Irani's website.
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jhalper | January 11, 2012Plaster from human dwellings or the signs of a long-abandoned animal enclosure? Tuesday's New York Times describes the collaboration between a chemist - structural biologist Prof. Steve Weiner, who is head of the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science at the Weizmann Institute - and American archaeologists. From China to the nearby site of biblical Gath, Weiner and his team have been applying the methods of advanced chemistry to solving riddles of the ancient world. (The answer, at least for the dig at Ashkelon, is fecal and decayed plant matter, meaning the apparent palace…
jhalper | January 8, 2012The actors on the stage work their magic, turning a few disparate phrases - "challenge, giving birth, infinity, chaos, visiting a new country" - into a brief but charming improvised sketch, to the delight of the audience. But the viewers, filling a large auditorium at the Weizmann Institute of Science, expect more than to be entertained. Since the improvised play is part of a lecture by Prof. Uri Alon, a Molecular Cell Biologist, they know scientific insights are bound to follow.
Indeed. Combining his two passions, science and theater, Alon has recently created a "theater lab" on the…
jhalper | December 26, 2011Often, simply identifying the structure of a potential drug target protein and designing a molecule to block it are not enough. Just ask Prof. Irit Sagi, a chemist turned biology researcher, who recently developed a clever technique for directing the body to design its own protein-blocking molecules.
Sagi studies an enzyme called matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9). This protein, along with other members of the MMP family, cleaves straight through the support tissues in the body - collagen and the extracellular matrix that gives organs and tissues structure. This, of course is crucial for…
jhalper | December 14, 2011Is it possible to perform operations on encrypted data, while keeping it secure from all prying eyes (or circuits), even if that data is stored remotely, in the "cloud?" Will our end result still be encrypted, and when we decode it with our private decryption key, will our result be correct? To put it another way, could we allow sensitive data - say private medical information - to be monitored on-line and feel completely secure in the knowledge that no one can access it without our express permission? Can we use a cloud service to store our encrypted data and perform a search on that data…
jhalper | December 13, 2011The Weizmann Institute's Prof. Eilam Gross is currently the ATLAS Higgs physics group convener. He originally wrote this piece in Hebrew for the Yediot Aharonot daily.
The Best There Is - For Now
"The God Particle," as the Higgs boson is often called, comes from the title of the book by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman that deals with the search for the elusive particle. This particle, according to the Standard Model of Particle Physics, is responsible for giving mass to all of the elementary particles in nature.
The mass of an electron determines the size of a hydrogen atom; ultimately the size…
jhalper | December 12, 2011If you followed this year's chemistry Nobel, you know about the quasicrystal design on the ties made for Prof. Dan Schechtman's 70th birthday. Even the prime minister was seen sporting one last week. But did you know there is also a quasicrystal scarf?
While Prof. Schechtman was getting his white tie and tails ready for the formal ceremony, this scarf was on display in fashionable Tel Aviv around the shoulders of Prof. Gitti Frey, a nanoscientist at the Technion.
Despite the photo op, fashion took a back seat to science last Thursday evening. Frey was the guest speaker at a Science on Tap…
jhalper | November 28, 2011This week's new Weizmann science stories are on ants and bats. Two different models for investigating human behavior? Yes, but not exactly in the ways you might imagine, and so much more than that.
Dr. Ofer Feinerman, the "ant scientist," is a new member of the Physics Faculty. In his graduate research under Prof. Elisha Moses in the Physics of Complex Systems Department, Feinerman created artificial circuits out of neurons. Now he has turned to investigating the complexities of ant societies. What, you might ask, do neurons and ant colonies have to do with physics? The answer is: They…
jhalper | November 13, 2011Proteins are strung together from amino acids attached in long chains, one after the other. But for most proteins, this is just the beginning - next they must fold. "Folding" is the general term for the way that a protein strand twists, coils, winds, pleats and creases into an intricate three-dimensional structure. Only then can it go to work.
The sequence of amino acids is what determines the final shape of the protein: Molecules assembled on the same plan will end up in the exact same configuration. The funny thing is, they don't all go through the same set of steps to arrive at their…
jhalper | November 1, 2011In this country, as in much of the Western world, we are constantly bemoaning slipping scores in math and science. So here's a bit of good news: The first 26 science teachers to participate in the Rothschild-Weizmann Program for Excellence in Science Teaching will be receiving their degrees in science education in a few weeks. This M.Sc. program is directed by the Feinberg Graduate School at the Weizmann Institute of Science.*
The idea of the program is simple: To improve science education, invest in the teachers. The Weizmann Institute invited high-school science and math teachers who…
jhalper | October 8, 2011Five articles (plus some photos from the recent Researchers' Night activities) are now online in the fall issue of Interface magazine (the Weizmann Institute's "friendly" science magazine).
â¢Read about a new kind of water treatment system - one that breaks down such complex, man-made chemicals in water as cleaning fluids, flame retardants and pesticide residues, turning them into simpler compounds that can then degrade naturally into harmless substances. Today, there is little that can be done about these pollutants, which are considered dangerous even in tiny amounts when they get into the…
jhalper | September 25, 2011The olfactory membranes in your nose are densely packed with smell receptors. These receptors come in some 400 different subtypes; complex odors like that of rose petals can waft around 175 distinct kinds of odor molecules in the direction of your nose. In other words, the number of discrete odors we can perceive runs to the tens of thousands. No wonder scientists had thought that the whole smell arrangement was basically random.
But research by Prof. Noam Sobel and his team in the Weizmann Neurobiology Department is bringing our noses into line with our other sensory organs. The arrangement…
jhalper | September 18, 2011Our latest annual report is now online, and we think the results are worth looking at. We started with a favorite theme -- art and science -- and took it a step further. Ten short pieces on scientific research that deals with movement -- of proteins, electrons, black holes or theoretical random walkers -- are paired with works of art on a similar theme. Then we added poetry and fiction written by scientists, for good measure.
The Insomniac City Cycles Ran SlavinStill from film, 2004-2009
It might all seem a bit exuberant, in light of continuing economic crises and regional politics. But if…
jhalper | September 12, 2011Last month, Penn Medicine put out a press release heralding a "cancer treatment breakthrough 20 years in the making." In a small clinical trial, three patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) were treated with genetically engineered versions of their own T cells. Just a few weeks after treatment the tumors had disappeared, and the patients remained in remission for a year before the study was published.
The release didn't, however, explain those "20 years in the making." In 1989, Prof. Zelig Eshhar of the Weizmann Institute's Immunology Department first published a paper…
jhalper | August 28, 2011A recent study by Prof. Ernesto Joselevich and his team, published in Science, features perfectly aligned horizontal arrays of thin, millimeter-long nanowires. We spoke with Joselevich recently to find out why he and others in the field are excited by this advance:
WSW: Your lab has produced a fair amount of innovative research in recent years. Why is this one special?
EJ: First of all, we succeeded in growing very long horizontal nanowires with exquisite control over their orientation. Because of the numerous potential uses for semiconductor nanowires, there is a lot of competition to…
jhalper | August 15, 2011Dr. Nachum Ulanovsky of the Weizmann Institute and Prof. Ran Nathan and Asaf Tsoar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have captured live fruit bats and glued tiny GPS transmitters to their backs, then driven the bats overnight to a site some 80 kilometers away and rappelled into the bats' caves to retrieve the transmitters after they fall off - all in the name of scientific research. In the process, the team has revealed how these bats form mental maps that they use to return to their favorite fruit trees night after night, often flying large distances and bypassing other, similar trees on…
jhalper | August 9, 2011What does a tiny patch of salamander retina see when it watches a movie? Weizmann Institute scientists, together with Dr. Ronen Segev at Ben-Gurion University, performed this experiment - literally showing film sequences to snippets of live retina tissue and recording the interactions between their 100 or so active neurons.
Seeing, as we know, is 3/4 interpretation and, contrary to common belief, this interpretation begins in the eye, before an image ever reaches the brain. Dr. Elad Schneidman and his colleagues found that unique patterns of neuron activity could be identified: There were…
jhalper | July 29, 2011One Thursday evening near the end of July, people sitting outside a local ice cream parlor watched a neurobiology Ph.D. student wave his hand in front of his face in imitation of a robot learning to sense itself as separate from its surroundings. Despite the trains arriving at the station in the background and the microphone feedback from a rival talk at an outdoor coffee shop across the plaza, the audience was engrossed in hearing how this simple robot, mostly built of Lego and a camera, is able to explore its environment in the same way a baby does.
All across the city of Rehovot,…
jhalper | July 23, 2011Today's science news from the Weizmann Institute covers research in neurobiology, environmental science and cancer immunology.
⢠In the first, scientists identified a likely biological marker for autism that shows up even in very young children. Diagnoses of autism are generally not possible so early, as the signs typically appear gradually throughout the first 3-4 years of life. The scientists used fMRI to scan the brains of children aged 1-3 who were just starting to show signs of autistic behavior. Their method: scanning the brains of toddlers while they sleep. It seems that even asleep…