News Releases
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Exploring the Physical World
Following the Footsteps of Humankind Out of Africa
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—June 14, 2021—The Boker Tachtit archaeological excavation site in Israel’s central Negev desert holds clues to one of the most significant events in human history: the spread of modern humans, Homo sapiens, from Africa into Eurasia, and the subsequent demise of Neanderthal populations in the region. Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Max Planck Society, led by Prof. Elisabetta Boaretto, together with Dr. Omry Barzilai of the Israel Antiquities Authority, returned to Boker Tachtit nearly 40 years after it was first excavated. Using advanced sampling and dating methods, they offer a new chronological framework for this important chapter in our anthropological evolution. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the study suggests that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were far from strangers.
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Improving Health & Medicine
Right Off the Bat: Navigation in Extra-Large Spaces
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—May 27, 2021—The brain is often likened to a computer: neurons organized in complex circuits serving as its hardware; its software a plethora of codes that govern the neurons’ behavior.
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Improving Health & Medicine
New Immune Players Involved in Metabolic Liver Disease
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—May 19, 2021—Our livers work hard to perform a significant range of activities: helping us digest food, maintaining body temperature, and serving as an important checkpoint of the immune system for everything that we eat. It is inside the liver that the unique, rich, and complex network of immune cells and pathways is set up to decide whether a food particle is harmless or a dangerous pathogen that should be neutralized and removed. The liver is, therefore, very sensitive to the food we consume, and sometimes a poor diet can induce a serious dysregulation of the immune activities within it.
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Improving Health & Medicine
A Natural Food Supplement May Relieve Anxiety
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—May 18, 2021—A natural food supplement reduces anxiety in mice, according to a new Weizmann Institute of Science study. The plant-derived substance, beta-sitosterol, was found to produce the calming effect both on its own and in synergic combination with a common antidepressant, fluoxetine (brand name Prozac). If these findings, published in Cell Reports Medicine, are confirmed in clinical trials, they could point the way toward the use of beta-sitosterol as a treatment for relieving anxiety in humans.
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Coronavirus
The Triple Threat of Coronavirus
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—May 12, 2021—Severe symptoms of COVID-19, leading often to death, are thought to result from the patient’s own acute immune response rather than from damage inflicted directly by the virus. Intensive research efforts are therefore seeking to determine how the SARS-CoV-2 virus manages to mount an effective invasion while throwing the immune system off course. A new study, published in Nature, reveals a multipronged strategy that the virus employs to ensure its quick and efficient replication, while avoiding detection by the immune system. The study, conducted jointly by the research groups of Dr. Noam Stern-Ginossar at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Dr. Nir Paran and Dr. Tomer Israely of the Israel Institute for Biological, Chemical and Environmental Sciences, focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms at work during infection by SARS-CoV-2 at the cellular level.
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Improving Health & Medicine
Brain Research Gets a Boost from Mosquitos
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—May 11, 2021—Can a protein found in a mosquito lead to a better understanding of the workings of our own brains? Prof. Ofer Yizhar and his team in the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Neurobiology took a light-sensitive protein derived from mosquitos and used it to devise an improved method for investigating the messages that are passed from neuron to neuron in the brains of mice. This method, reported in Neuron, could potentially help scientists solve age-old cerebral mysteries and pave the way for new and improved therapies to treat neurological and psychiatric conditions.
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Improving Health & Medicine
The Hunger Games: Uncovering the Secret of the Hunger Switch in the Brain
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—April 14, 2021—Being constantly hungry, no matter how much you eat – that’s the daily struggle of people with genetic defects in the brain’s appetite controls, and it often ends in severe obesity. In a study published in Science, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, together with colleagues from the Queen Mary University of London and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have revealed the mechanism of action of the master switch for hunger in the brain: a receptor called melanocortin 4 (MC4). They have also clarified how this switch is activated by setmelanotide (brand name Imcivree), a drug recently approved for the treatment of severe obesity caused by certain genetic changes. The team’s findings shed new light on the way hunger is regulated and may help develop improved anti-obesity medications.
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Protecting Our Planet
How Bushfire Smoke Traveled Around the World
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—March 18, 2021—It’s not just how hot the fires burn – it’s also where they burn that matters. During the recent extreme fire season in Australia, which began in 2019 and burned into 2020, millions of tons of smoke particles were released into the atmosphere. Most of those particles followed a typical pattern and settled to the ground after a day or week; however, the particles created in fires burning in one area of the country managed to blanket the entire Southern Hemisphere for months. When studying particle-laden haze, two researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science noticed puzzling spikes in a certain measurement, and tracked the elevated levels to the fires in that area. Next, as reported in Science, the Israeli scientists uncovered the “perfect storm” of circumstances that swept the particles emitted from those fires into the upper atmosphere and spread them over the entire Southern Hemisphere.
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Improving Health & Medicine
Advanced Mouse Embryos Grown Outside the Uterus
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—March 17, 2021—To observe how a tiny ball of identical cells on its way to becoming a mammalian embryo first attaches to an awaiting uterine wall and then develops into the nervous system, heart, stomach, and limbs: This has been a highly sought-after grail in the field of embryonic development for nearly 100 years. Now, Prof. Jacob Hanna of the Weizmann Institute of Science and his group have accomplished this feat. The method they created for growing mouse embryos outside the womb during the initial stages after embryo implantation will give researchers an unprecedented tool for understanding the development program encoded in the genes, and may provide detailed insights into birth and developmental defects as well as those involved in embryo implantation. The results were published in Nature.
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Fighting Cancer
Bacteria May Aid Anti-Cancer Immune Response
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—March 17, 2021—Cancer immunotherapy may get a boost from an unexpected direction: bacteria residing within tumor cells. In a new study published in Nature, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science and their collaborators have discovered that the immune system “sees” these bacteria and shown that they can be harnessed to provoke an immune reaction against the tumor. The study may also help clarify the connection between immunotherapy and the gut microbiome, explaining the findings of previous research showing that the microbiome affects the success of immunotherapy.
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Exploring the Physical World
How “Great” Was the Great Oxygenation Event?
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—February 25, 2021—Around 2.5 billion years ago, our planet experienced what was possibly the greatest change in its history: According to the geological record, molecular oxygen suddenly went from nonexistent to becoming freely available everywhere. Evidence for what is called the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) is clearly visible – for example, in banded iron formations containing oxidized iron. The GOE is, of course, what allowed oxygen-using organisms – including, eventually, us – to evolve. But was it indeed a “great event” in the sense that the change was radical and sudden, or were organisms that were alive at the time already using free oxygen, just at lower levels?
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Advancing Technology
Weizmann Institute of Science and Mohamed bin Zayed University Establish Joint AI Program
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—February 24, 2021—Following the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) and the United Arab Emirates’ Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in September 2020, the two institutions have announced the establishment of the WIS-MBZUAI Joint Program for Artificial Intelligence Research. The new program will promote collaborative initiatives in fundamental artificial intelligence (AI) research and will explore AI applications in domains such as healthcare, genomics, and more.
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Fighting Cancer
Uncovering the Anti-Myeloma Resistance Files
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—February 23, 2021—Multiple myeloma patients live much longer today than in the past, thanks to new targeted anti-myeloma drugs, but ultimately most people develop resistance to the medications, and in some the disease is resistant to therapy from the start. Weizmann Institute of Science researchers, in collaboration with physicians from Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (TASMC), have made use of extremely sensitive genomic technology to reveal genetic pathways that characterize some of the more resistant cases of multiple myeloma. Their study, reported in Nature Medicine, may lead to a more informed, personalized treatment for these patients, and paves the way for using this new technology to discover disease targets in other cancers.
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Improving Health & Medicine
Seasons of Our Hormones
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—February 2, 2021—Our minds may be affected by winter’s long nights or spring and its flowers, but what about our bodies? A new study at the Weizmann Institute of Science reveals that our hormones also follow a seasonal pattern. By analyzing data on several types of hormones from millions of blood tests, the researchers discovered that some hormones peak in winter or spring and others in summer. This research, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), provides a broad, dynamic picture of hormone production – covering those connected to fertility, for example, but also hormones such as cortisol, which are mostly short-lived and not thought to be seasonal.
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Improving Health & Medicine
Stress on Every Cell: Mapping the Stress Axis in Detail
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—January 27, 2021—Chronic stress could be the prevailing condition of our time. In the short term, our jaws or stomachs may clench; in the long term, stress can lead to metabolic disease and speed up diseases of aging, as well as leading to more serious psychological disorders. The physical manifestations of stress originate in the brain, and they move along a so-called “stress axis” that ends in the adrenal glands. These glands then produce the hormone cortisol. When the stress axis is continually activated, changes occur in the cells and organs along the way, and the continual production of cortisol then substantially contributes to the symptoms of chronic stress.
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Improving Health & Medicine
A Brain Mechanism Underlying “Vision” in the Blind is Revealed
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—January 7, 2021—Some people lose their eyesight, yet continue to “see.” This phenomenon, a kind of vivid visual hallucination, is named after Swiss doctor Charles Bonnet, who described in 1769 how his completely blind grandfather experienced intense, detailed visions of people, animals, and objects.
