Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet. The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds.
May 21, 2018
The 6,000 miles between them made no difference when 200 students in Israel and in the Boston area jointly created evolution in test tubes. The 10-day science experiment helped them understand how antibiotic-resistant bacterial “superbugs” evolve. The teens designed their experiments on Google Sheets, and these instructions were automatically carried out by a robot in a lab at the University of Massachusetts.
May 14, 2018
Squeeze through or go around? Phys.org covers research from the lab of Dr. Ofer Feinerman that provides insight into how ants collaborate to bring food home to the nest.
May 10, 2018
The Washington Post’s article about Jupiter’s reaching opposition talks to Weizmann’s Prof. Yohai Kaspi, who is part of NASA missions to study the Jovian planet.
May 08, 2018
Immuno therapy was once the black sheep of cancer research. Originally conceived over a century ago, it aims to stimulate a patient’s own immune system to fight cancer. That’s a very different approach than chemotherapy, which essentially poisons tumors.
May 08, 2018
Psychology Today reports on the symptoms of “secret anxiety,” citing Weizmann Institute research showing that stressed people perceive the world differently.
May 04, 2018
Weizmann’s Prof. Irit Dinur is one of four cutting-edge theoretical computer scientists who are “within striking distance of one of the great conjectures of their discipline”
April 24, 2018
Weizmann’s Prof. Ido Amit is among the scientists presented in this Scientific American article about the search for new approaches to Alzheimer’s.
April 24, 2018
When the physician and scientist Emil Lou was an oncology fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center about a decade ago, he was regularly troubled by the sight of something small but unidentifiable in his cancer-cell cultures. Looking through the microscope, he said, he “kept finding these long, thin translucent lines,” about 50 nanometers wide and 150 to 200 microns long, extending between cells in the culture. He called on the world-class cell biologists in his building to explain these observations, but nobody was sure what they were looking at. Finally, after delving into the literature, Lou realized that the lines matched what Hans-Hermann Gerdes’ group at the University of Heidelberg had described as “nanotubular highways” or “tunneling nanotubes” (TNTs) in a 2004 paper in Science.
April 23, 2018
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