About Us
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.
Scientists say they have discovered a biological anomaly that could change how we understand our sense of smell. The study in the journal Neuron shows some people can smell normally, despite missing the part of the brain that is considered to be crucial for smell - the olfactory bulbs. Lacking bulbs should cause anosmia (being unable to smell). Curiously, the phenomenon mostly affects left-handed women, and has never been detected in men.
November 07, 2019
Weizmann scientists and colleagues developed an algorithm that categorized mice according to personality – a tool that could be invaluable in experiments involving mice, says Phys.org.
November 07, 2019
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
Recognizing faces is as natural and habitual as can be for human beings. Even with their undeveloped vision, babies can recognize their mother’s face within days, while adults typically know some 5,000 faces. But what actually happens inside our brains during the process of recognizing a face? How are different facial features encoded in our brains? And can artificial intelligence learn to recognize faces the way humans do?
November 05, 2019
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
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
As reported in Globes, Prof. Ada Yonath and Evogene Ltd. are partnering to develop a treatment against antibiotic-resistant strains of Staphylococcus.
October 24, 2019
JERUSALEM, Oct. 24 (Xinhua) – Israeli scientists revealed the mechanism of the sea cone snail’s venom, which may lead to new drugs for abnormal heart rate and high blood pressure, the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) reported Thursday.
The findings may also lead to the development of safe natural insecticides, because some components of this venom only kill insects, and not mammals.
The findings, published in the scientific journal PNAS, may explain some of the side effects of potassium-blocking drugs, such as heart arrythmia and hypertension drugs, and lead to the development of better ones.
October 24, 2019
Our bodies are home to about 100 trillion tiny microbes.
Your body is composed of about 10 million human cells. It’s also home to about 100 trillion tiny microbes, mainly bacteria, that wield astonishing power over your health.
Many influences, from genetics, to diet and stress, contribute to the makeup of your microbiome — the collective community of microbes as personal as a fingerprint.
October 15, 2019
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