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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.
Mar 02, 2020...
The concept of time crystals comes from the realm of counterintuitive mind-melding physics ideas that may actually turn out to have real-world applications. Now comes news that a paper proposes merging time crystals with topological superconductors for applications in error-free quantum computing, extremely precise timekeeping and more.
Time crystals were first proposed as hypothetical structures by the Nobel-Prize winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek and MIT physicists in 2012. The remarkable feature of time crystals is that they would would move without using energy. As such they would appear to break the fundamental physics law of time-translation symmetry. They would move while staying in their ground states, when they are at their lowest energy, appearing to be in a kind of perpetual motion. Wilczek offered mathematical proof that showed how atoms of crystallizing matter could regularly form repeating lattices in time, while not consuming or producing any energy.
Feb 24, 2020... In October 2019, Google announced that its quantum computer, Sycamore, had done a calculation in three minutes and 20 seconds that would have taken the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years. “Quantum supremacy,” Google claimed for itself. We now have a quantum computer, it was saying, capable of performing calculations that no regular, “classical” computer is capable of doing in a reasonable time.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/navigating-the-new-normal/
May 06, 2020... To roll back this calamitous cascade of events, we need exit strategies— integrated sets of policies that will enable a responsible re-boot of productivity while minimizing the risk of COVID-19 resurgence. One component within such a broad strategy, recently proposed by the Weizmann Institute’s Prof. Uri Alon and Prof. Ron Milo, rests on a novel mathematical model for public health involving a cyclic schedule of lockdown and free movement.
May 08, 2020...
It started with a tweet. Alpha Lee, co-founder and chief scientific officer of machine-learning company PostEra, read on Twitter that Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility, had identified a set of chemical fragments that attach to an important coronavirus protein.
Lee wondered if his company, formed just six months earlier, could help connect the dots from fragments to viable drugs to fight COVID-19. PostEra uses AI algorithms to map routes for drug synthesis to speed the drug discovery process. But to do so, they would need some design ideas. So Lee asked the Internet.
May 09, 2020...
Collecting data and maintaining privacy do not have to rule each other out, according to computer scientist Shafi Goldwasser.
Goldwasser, 61, a professor at MIT, UC Berkeley, and Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, is a Turing Award and Gödel Prize laureate. She is also the co-founder and chief scientist at Duality Technologies Inc., a Tel Aviv and Maplewood, New Jersey-based startup that develops technologies for sharing and analyzing encrypted and anonymized data.
May 11, 2020...
If we cannot resume economic activity without causing a resurgence of Covid-19 infections, we face a grim, unpredictable future of opening and closing schools and businesses.
We can find a way out of this dilemma by exploiting a key property of the virus: its latent period — the three-day delay on average between the time a person is infected and the time he or she can infect others.
People can work in two-week cycles, on the job for four days then, by the time they might become infectious, 10 days at home in lockdown. The strategy works even better when the population is split into two groups of households working alternating weeks.
Apr 21, 2020...
Remember the exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7s that made headlines three years ago?
Well, it turns out smartphones aren’t the only machines whose lithium-ion batteries can explode when overloaded. E-cigarettes, airplanes and electric vehicles also blow up from overheated batteries.
“When you sit on an e-bike, right over the battery, you are sitting on energy that is equivalent to 1 kilo of gunpowder, and in electric cars it’s equivalent to 100 times that much,” points out Niles Fleischer, CEO of Israeli startup ALGOLiON.
May 04, 2020... In this video, Profs. Ron Milo and Uri Alon succinctly and clearly explain their “intermittent work” strategy for restarting the economy without triggering a new wave of COVID infections.
May 13, 2020... ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today recognized three individuals with awards for their exemplary service to the computing field. Working in diverse areas, the 2019 award recipients were selected by their peers for longstanding efforts that have strengthened the community. This year’s ACM award recipients made seminal contributions in areas including textbooks and educational tools, bibliographic resources, and advancing the computing community in India.
May 13, 2020...
Israeli researchers have discovered new entities created from interaction between matter and light particles, Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) reported Wednesday.
The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, has several implications in developing quantum applications, fine control of chemical processes and designing new materials.
The difference between light and matter should be a clear and simple division, but there are situations in which the two become so closely connected that the situation becomes blurred.
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