News Releases
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Maggie Howard Appointed Associate Executive Director, Southern California Region
The American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science announced that Maggie Howard has been appointed as Associate Executive Director of its Southern California Region. Ms. Howard will play a critical role in advancing local philanthropic efforts to support the Weizmann Institute, a top-ranking, multidisciplinary research institution located in Rehovot, Israel.
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Enriching Education
The Weizmann Institute of Science is Ninth in the World in Research Quality
The Weizmann Institute of Science has placed ninth in an international ranking of research quality. This is the second time that the Institute has ranked in the top 10 best research institutes in the world. (The Institute placed 10th in the 2015 ranking.) The assessment comes from the annual Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) Leiden Ranking, Leiden University, the Netherlands.
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Exploring the Physical World
XENON1T Team Sets Limits
Dr. Ran Budnik and his team at the Weizmann Institute of Science joined 165 researchers from 27 research institutes around the world working on the XENON1T experiment. This experiment is the most sensitive by far to search for dark matter, and the results they reported this week set a stringent limit on the possible mass of particles that could make up the elusive dark matter. Following these results, based on research that utilized a tank containing over a ton of liquid xenon and on data collected for almost a year, the scientists are planning an even larger, more-sensitive experiment – XENONnT – for 2019.
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Improving Health & Medicine
Body Knows Best: A Natural Healing Mechanism for Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Treating inflammatory diseases of the bowel is extremely challenging: genes, gut microbes, and disrupted immune function all contribute. Weizmann Institute of Science researchers are proposing a way around this complexity. In a study in mice, published in Cell Reports, they have found a way to trigger a natural defense mechanism that prompts the body itself to alleviate intestinal inflammation.
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Enriching Education
Passing it On, Thanks to PERACH
In the course of writing his doctoral thesis, Emanuel (Emil) Eidin, a student in the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Science Teaching, started thinking about the people he would like to thank in the acknowledgements section. He decided that some of the people to whom gratitude was due were the PERACH mentors who had helped him as a child.
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American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science Celebrates Return to Washington, D.C.
The American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science celebrated the return of its Washington, D.C. and Mid-Atlantic Office with a special event at the Embassy of Israel. The evening attracted about 65 local supporters of the Weizmann Institute, one of the world’s leading multidisciplinary research institutions located in Rehovot, Israel. After opening remarks by American Committee CEO Marshall S. Levin, National Chair Ellen Merlo discussed the significance of reestablishing the organization’s Mid-Atlantic Region. Reuven Azar, Deputy Head of Mission at the Embassy of Israel, then welcomed guests, and illustrated the power of scientific cooperation to build bridges between Israel and other nations.
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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.