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.
October 16, 2017
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).
October 03, 2017
The idea of proteins that can be designed on computers for specific functions has been a cutting-edge concept that has stubbornly remained “in the future.” New research at the Weizmann Institute of Science may bring that future a bit closer. By going back to nature’s drawing board – evolution – the scientists have created new proteins, based on “existing natural parts,” that carry out their intended function with flying colors. These findings were reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
September 26, 2017
Mountain climbers and endurance athletes are not the only ones to benefit from altitude training – that is, learning to perform well under low-oxygen conditions. It turns out that cancer-fighting cells of the immune system can also improve their performance through a cellular version of such a regimen. In a study published in Cell Reports, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers have shown that the immune system’s killer T cells destroy cancerous tumors much more effectively after being starved for oxygen.
September 2017
Humans and fish share about 70% of their protein-coding genes, but only about 0.5% of their regulatory long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs)
One often hears about the multitude of genes we have in common with chimps or other living creatures, but such comparisons are sometimes misleading. “Humans and fish, for instance, share about 70% of their protein-coding genes, but only about 0.5% of an important class of regulatory genes – ones that give rise to so-called long non-coding RNAs, or lncRNAs,” says Dr. Igor Ulitsky of the Department of Biological Regulation at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
September 2017
When investigating atoms, scientists face a challenge: at room temperature, individual atoms in a gas have kinetic energy, and fly around at high velocities. Temperature is, in essence, the relative movement between atoms; thus, the goal of getting the atoms to have small relative velocities involves freezing them to extremely cold temperatures. Now, a group at the Weizmann Institute of Science has developed a new universal method for cooling ions.
September 2017
To the list of reasons that chemotherapy sometimes does not work, we can now add one more: bacteria. In a study just published in Science, researchers describe their findings showing that certain bacteria can be found inside human pancreatic tumors. The findings further revealed that some of these bacteria contain an enzyme that inactivates a common drug used to treat various cancers, including pancreatic cancer. Working with mouse models of cancer, the scientists demonstrated how treatment with antibiotics on top of chemotherapy may be significantly superior to treatment with chemotherapy alone.
September 14, 2017
Ever wanted to know how to fix a broken heart? What a scratch, pneumonia, and soil pollution have in common? Why insects could be the food of the future? Researchers’ Night at the Weizmann Institute of Science is an evening dedicated to science for everyone – to answering any and all questions about science. Researchers’ Night has been taking place annually at the Weizmann Institute of Science since 2006, as part of the European Union Researchers’ Night event that takes place in hundreds of sites all over Europe. In Israel, it occurs within a nationwide framework of activities at academic research institutes and science museums and is supported by the Israeli Ministry of Science, Technology and Space. Researchers’ Night at the Weizmann Institute is organized by the Davidson Institute of Science Education, the Weizmann Institute’s educational arm.
August 2017
It is said that a weak link determines the strength of the entire chain. Likewise, defects or small cracks in a solid material may ultimately determine the strength of that material – how well it will withstand various forces. For example, if force is exerted on a material containing a crack, large internal stresses will concentrate on a small region near the crack’s edge. When this happens, a failure process is initiated, and the material might begin to fail around the edge of the crack, which could then propagate, leading to the ultimate failure of the material.
August 24, 2017
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