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Founded in 1944, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science develops philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and advances its mission of science for the benefit of humanity.

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Popular science for the curious-minded: The Curiosity Review brings discovery to life.

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  • Protecting Our Planet
    The Greenest Diet: Bacteria Switch to Eating Carbon Dioxide

    Bacteria in the lab of Prof. Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science have not just sworn off sugar – they have stopped eating all of their normal solid food, existing instead on carbon dioxide (CO2) from their environment. That is, they were able to build all of their biomass from air. This feat, which involved nearly a decade of rational design, genetic engineering, and a sped-up version of evolution in the lab, was reported in Cell. The findings point to means of developing, in the future, carbon-neutral fuels.

    November 27, 2019

  • Improving Health & Medicine
    An Exception to the Rule: An Intact Sense of Smell Without a Crucial Olfactory Brain Structure

    Is a pair of brain structures called the olfactory bulbs, which are said to encode our sense of smell, necessary? That is, are they essential to the existence of this sense? Weizmann Institute of Science researchers recently showed that some humans can smell just fine, thank you, without said bulbs. Their finding – that around 0.6% of women, and more specifically, up to 4% of left-handed women, have completely intact senses of smell despite having no olfactory bulbs in their brains – calls into question the accepted notion that this structure is absolutely necessary for the act of smelling. The findings of this research, which were published in Neuron, could shake up certain conventional theories that describe the workings of our sense of smell.

    November 06, 2019

  • Improving Health & Medicine
    For the First Time: A Method for Measuring Animal Personality

    We might refer to someone’s personality as “mousy,” but in truth, mice have a range of personalities nearly as great as our own. Prof. Alon Chen and members of two groups he heads – one in the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Neurobiology and one in the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany – decided to explore personality specifically in mice. This would enable the scientists to develop a set of objective measurements for this highly slippery concept. A quantitative understanding of the traits that make each animal an individual might help answer some of the open questions in science concerning the connections between genes and behavior. The findings of this research were published in Nature Neuroscience.

    November 04, 2019

  • Improving Health & Medicine
    Converging Solutions: Artificial Networks Shed Light on Human Face Recognition

    Our brains are so primed to recognize faces – or to tell people apart – that we rarely even stop to think about it, but what happens in the brain when it engages in such recognition is still far from understood. In a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have shed new light on this issue. They found a striking similarity between the way in which faces are encoded in the brain and successfully performing artificial intelligence (AI) systems known as deep neural networks.

    October 30, 2019

  • Improving Health & Medicine
    Ebola Antibodies at Work

    In the recurring, deadly Ebola outbreaks in parts of Africa, today’s health workers now have at least some tools to fight the disease: vaccines. Vaccines against Ebola have been administered to over 100,000 people to date, but they are barely out of the experimental stage. It is not known how well these vaccines will provide long-term protection across a broad population. Furthermore, on the basic scientific level, the effects of vaccination on the immune system and how the immune response of vaccinated individuals compares with that of individuals who have survived Ebola infections was not known. A Weizmann Institute of Science lab recently joined forces with a research team in Cologne, Germany, to uncover the details of the molecular response that occurs in the immune system after vaccination against Ebola. Their findings may help health organizations devise better strategies for containing and preventing the disease.

    October 07, 2019

  • Fighting Cancer
    A New Route to Blocking Children’s Bone Cancer

    Ewing sarcoma is a bone cancer that appears mainly in teenagers. Caused by a single defective gene, once it spreads to distant organs it is hard to treat. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have now discovered molecular interactions underlying Ewing sarcomas and proposed a potential treatment that has shown promise in a study in mice. These findings were published in Cell Reports.

    October 02, 2019

  • Fighting Cancer
    Cancer Protocols: A New Approach to Predicting Treatment Outcomes

    Diversity – at least among cancer cells – is not a good thing. Now, research from the Weizmann Institute of Science shows that in melanoma, tumors with cells that have differentiated into more diverse subtypes are less likely to be affected by the immune system, thus reducing the chance that immunotherapy will be effective. The findings of this research, which were published in Cell, may provide better tools for designing personalized protocols for cancer patients, as well as pointing toward new avenues of research into anti-cancer vaccines.

    September 12, 2019

  • Improving Health & Medicine
    Firework Memories

    Extraterrestrial scientists landing in a football stadium would be struck by the sight of the crowd suddenly standing up and shouting in unison. In a similar manner, since the 1990s, researchers have observed a special pattern of neuronal activity in rodents: tens of thousands of nerve cells firing in unison in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. But, like alien scientists, the researchers have not been able to understand the “language” of the rodents’ minds when these mysterious synchronous bursts occurred. Recently, however, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers succeeded in recording these rapid bursts of activity – called “hippocampal ripples” – in the human brain, and were able to demonstrate their importance as a neuronal mechanism underlying the engraving of new memories and their subsequent recall. These findings appeared in Science.

    August 15, 2019

  • Exploring the Physical World
    Next-Gen Israeli Satellite to Seek Out Cosmic Explosions and Black Holes

    Weighing in at just about 160 kg (around 353 lbs), a new type of scientific satellite is planned to be built in Israel over the next four years, with a projected launch date of 2023. The satellite, known as ULTRASAT, will carry a telescope designed to observe the universe as it has never been seen before. The satellite will operate in a range of light that is normally invisible to us – ultraviolet, or UV – and have a very large field of view.

    August 12, 2019

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