When investigating atoms, scientists face a challenge – at room temperature, individual atoms in a gas have kinetic energy and spin about at high velocities. Temperature is, in essence, the measurement of the relative movement between atoms; thus the goal of getting the atoms to have small relative velocities involves freezing them to extremely cold temperatures.
December 17, 2017
Using lab-grown brains, Weizmann’s Prof. Orly Reiner showed how brain folds develop, shedding light on smooth-brain disease
December 12, 2017
Scientists from Israel and abroad have designed microscopic silk capsules that can serve as a protective environment for the transport of fragile protein “cargo” for cosmetic, food and pharmaceutical applications — particularly the delivery of drugs within the body. The collaborative research, performed by an international team of academics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel; the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Sheffield in the UK; and the ETH in Switzerland, was reported in Nature Communications on July 19.
December 05, 2017
Weizmann’s Dr. Elisabetta Boaretto, using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, and colleagues from Copenhagen found that the “15,000-year-old ‘Natufian Culture’” could live in zones previously thought to be either uninhabitable or only sparsely populated.
December 05, 2017
The Israeli crystallographer, who shared the chemistry Nobel with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz in 2009 for her work on ribosome, was delivering the 79th Foundation Day lecture on “Next Generation Environmental Friendly Antibiotics” at Bose Institute on Thursday. “Resistance to antibiotics is a real big problem to modern medicine. Multi-drug resistance has developed not because we use antibiotics, but because bacteria has evolved and uses mechanisms against other bacteria in their fight for resources,” Yonath said.
December 01, 2017
In 2019, if everything goes according to plan, the much-delayed James Webb Space Telescope will finally launch into orbit. Once assembled, it will use an array of 18 hexagonal mirrors to collect and focus the light from distant galaxies. This segmented-mirror design was developed in the 1980s, and it has been so successful that it will feature in almost all the large telescopes to be built in the near future. But as always, nature got there first. For millions of years, scallops have been gazing at the world using dozens of eyes, each of which has a segmented mirror that’s uncannily similar to those in our grandest telescopes. And scientists have just gotten a good look at one for the first time.
November 30, 2017
Weizmann scientists used new technology to see the complex beauty of the scallop’s hundreds of eyes. The New York Times reports.
November 30, 2017
The lack of ability to “smell fear” may reveal clues about behaviour and brain development in people with autism, according to a new study. We may not be aware of it, but research suggests many people are able to smell fear. In fact, the ability to subliminally detect and respond to odours may relate to a variety of emotions we feel, ranging from happiness to aggression. But in a new study published in Nature Neuroscience, Professor Noam Sobel and collaborators at the Weizmann Institute of Science suggest this ability might be disrupted in people with autism. People with autism often have difficulty processing sensory information.
November 29, 2017
While humans aren’t as smell-dependent as many other animals, studies have shown we respond differently to others when they’re emitting certain olfactory signals—even if we can’t consciously detect them. In a study published today in Nature Neuroscience, researchers find that men with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) sometimes respond differently to these chemical cues in human sweat than do people without the disorder, indicating that such responses may partly explain the disorder’s symptoms.
November 27, 2017
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