News Releases
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Protecting Our Planet
Food Waste: The Biggest Loss Could Be What You Choose to Put in Your Mouth
About a third of the food produced for human consumption is estimated to be lost or wasted globally. But the biggest waste, which is not included in that estimate, may be through dietary choices that result in the squandering of environmental resources. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science and their colleagues have now found a novel way to define and quantify this second type of wastage. The scientists have called it “opportunity food loss,” a term inspired by the “opportunity cost” concept in economics, which refers to the cost of choosing a particular alternative over better options.
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Exploring the Physical World
Unveiling the Depths of Jupiter’s Winds
Three papers appearing in Nature on March 8 answer a question that scientists have been asking ever since Galileo first observed the famous stripes of Jupiter: Are the colorful bands just a pretty surface phenomenon, or are they a significant stratum of the planet? The Weizmann Institute of Science’s Prof. Yohai Kaspi led this research, in which measurements from NASA’s Juno spacecraft were analyzed to reveal that the stripes – belts of strong winds circling the planet – extend to a depth of about 3,000 km (about 1,900 miles). That is quite a bit deeper than previous estimates, and is revising scientists’ picture of Jupiter’s atmosphere as well as its inner layers.
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Improving Health & Medicine
Genetics or Lifestyle: What Is It That Shapes Our Microbiome?
The question of nature vs. nurture extends to our microbiome – the personal complement of mostly friendly bacteria we carry around with us. Study after study has found that our microbiome affects nearly every aspect of our health, and that the composition of our microbes, which varies from individual to individual, may hold the key to everything from weight gain to mood. Some microbiome researchers had suggested that this variation begins with differences in our genes, but a large-scale study conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science challenges this idea and provides evidence that the connection between microbiome and health may be even more important than we thought.
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Improving Health & Medicine
“Brain on a Chip” Reveals How the Brain Folds
Being born with a “tabula rasa” – a clean slate – is, in the case of the brain, something of a curse. Our brains are already wrinkled like walnuts by the time we are born. Babies born without these wrinkles – called smooth brain syndrome – suffer from severe developmental deficiencies and their life expectancy is markedly reduced. The gene that causes this syndrome recently helped Weizmann Institute of Science researchers to probe the physical forces that cause the brain’s wrinkles to form. In their findings, reported in Nature Physics, the researchers describe a method they developed for growing tiny “brains on chips” from human cells that enabled them to track the physical and biological mechanisms underlying the wrinkling process.
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Jill Moskowitz Appointed Executive Director of Washington, D.C. and Mid-Atlantic Region
The American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science announced that Jill Moskowitz had joined the organization as Executive Director, Washington, D.C. and Mid-Atlantic Region.
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Improving Health & Medicine
Bacterial Immune Systems Take the Stage
Until a decade ago, scientists were not aware that bacteria had complex immune systems – ones that could keep up with the pace of evolution in viruses called phages that infect bacteria. That changed with the discovery of what is now the most famous bacterial immune mechanism: CRISPR. Scientists realized that CRISPR is a natural gene editor, and it has revolutionized the world of biological research in thousands of labs around the world. Researchers now understand that most microorganisms have sophisticated immune systems, of which CRISPR is just one element, but there has been no good way to identify these systems.
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Improving Health & Medicine
Mapping the Social Landscape
Whether we’re playing a team sport or just strolling through the park, we’re continually aware of the positions of those around us – and where each is heading. Scientists have, in recent decades, pinpointed neurons called “place cells” in our brains that encode our own location in the environment, but how our brains represent the positions of others has been a mystery. Published in Science, new Weizmann Institute of Science research in bats reveals a sub-population of neurons that encode the specific locations of other bats that are flying nearby.
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Protecting Our Planet
Making Larvae Count
Prof. Rotem Sorek of the Weizmann Institute of Science; Prof. Roi Holzman of the School of Zoology and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Tel Aviv University; and Dr. Moshe Kiflawi of Ben Gurion University have now produced a way to understand precisely which species of larvae are present in the water around reefs. Their study, which involved genetic “barcoding” of nearly all the fish species in the gulf between Eilat and Aqaba, not only showed which larvae were in the gulf, but how many of each were swimming around, at what time of year, and at what depths. This study was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
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Improving Health & Medicine
How Malaria Tricks the Immune System
Global efforts to eradicate malaria are crucially dependent on scientists’ ability to outsmart the malaria parasite. And Plasmodium falciparum is notoriously clever: it is quick to develop resistance against medications and has such a complex life cycle that blocking it effectively with a vaccine has thus far proved elusive. In a new study reported in Nature Communications, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, together with collaborators in Ireland and Australia, have shown that P. falciparum is even more devious than previously thought: not only does it hide from the body’s immune defenses, it employs an active strategy to deceive the immune system.
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Exploring the Physical World
Uncovering Varied Pathways to Agriculture
Around 15,000 years ago, the Natufian culture appeared in what is today’s Middle East. This culture, which straddled the border between nomadic and settled lifestyles, had diverse, complex origins – much more than researchers had assumed. This finding arises from new research by a team of scientists and archaeologists from the Weizmann Institute of Science and the University of Copenhagen.
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David Teplow Elected President of the American Committee
At its annual meeting, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science announced that its Board of Directors had elected a new President, David Teplow of Weston, MA. He succeeds outgoing President Dr. Jay A. Levy of San Francisco, CA, who completed two terms of service. Mr. Teplow, in collaboration with National Chair Ellen Merlo and CEO Marshall S. Levin, will spearhead the American Committee’s efforts to generate awareness of and philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, a world-renowned center of scientific research and graduate study.
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Enriching Education
American Committee Launches 75th Anniversary Campaign
At its Leadership Retreat and Annual Meeting of the Board of Directors, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science announced the launch of the public phase of its 75th anniversary campaign, Transforming Tomorrow: Accelerate the Next 75 Years of Scientific Breakthroughs. The campaign aims to raise $225 million in support of the Weizmann Institute, one of the world’s leading multidisciplinary research institutions located in Rehovot, Israel.
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Improving Health & Medicine
Autism and the Smell of Fear
Autism typically involves the inability to read social cues. We most often associate this with visual difficulty in interpreting facial expression, but new research at the Weizmann Institute of Science suggests that the sense of smell may also play a central role in autism. As reported in Nature Neuroscience, Institute researchers show that people on the autism spectrum have different – and even opposite – reactions to odors produced by the human body. These odors are ones that we are unaware of smelling, but which are, nonetheless, a part of the nonverbal communication that takes place between people, and which have been shown to affect our moods and behavior. Their findings may provide a unique window on autism, including, possibly, on the underlying developmental malfunctions in the disorder.
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Exploring the Physical World
Off Track: How Storms Will Veer in a Warmer World
Under global climate change, the Earth’s climatic zones will shift toward the poles. This is not just a prediction; it is a trend that has already been observed in the past decades. The dry, semi-arid regions are expanding into higher latitudes, and temperate, rainy regions are migrating poleward. In a paper that that was recently published in Nature Geoscience, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers provide new insight into this phenomenon by discovering that mid-latitude storms are steered further toward the poles in a warmer climate. Their analysis, which also revealed the physical mechanisms controlling this phenomenon, involved a unique approach that traced the progression of low-pressure weather systems both from the outside – in their movement around the globe – and the inside, analyzing the storms’ dynamics.
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Exploring the Physical World
Crashing Neutron Stars Observed for the First Time
An international research team, including physicists from the Weizmann Institute of Science, has for the first time succeeded in observing a merger of two colliding neutron stars. The merger was simultaneously picked up by three detectors built for this purpose: the two belonging to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, in the United States, and the Virgo detector in Italy. The observation may help determine how such heavy elements as uranium, iodine, and gold were formed, as well as enhance our understanding of some of the most violent events in the history of the universe.
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Enriching Education
USAID Supports Cutting-Edge Research at the Feinberg Graduate School of the Weizmann Institute of Science
The American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science is pleased to announce the award of $1,200,000 by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) American Schools and Hospitals Abroad (ASHA) program to the Feinberg Graduate School (FGS) at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The award, made to the Trustees of the Feinberg Graduate School, will support the purchase of critical instrumentation for the newly established Food and Environmental Metabolomics Lab (FEM-Lab).