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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 09, 2020...
Electrons spin. It's a fundamental part of their existence. Some spin “up” while others spin “down.” Scientists have known this for about a century, thanks to quantum physics.
They've also known that magnetic fields can affect the direction of an electron’s quantum spin, flipping it from up to down and vice versa. And it doesn't take much: Even a bacterial cell can do it.
Researchers at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science have found that protein “wires” connecting a bacterial cell to a solid surface tend to transmit electrons with a particular spin.
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.
Mar 02, 2020...
To heat a slice of pizza, you probably wouldn’t consider first chilling it in the fridge. But a theoretical study suggests that cooling, as a first step before heating, may be the fastest way to warm up certain materials. In fact, such precooling could lead sometimes to exponentially faster heating, two physicists calculate in a study accepted in Physical Review Letters.
The concept is similar to the Mpemba effect, the counterintuitive — and controversial — observation that hot water sometimes freezes faster than cold water (SN: 1/6/17). Scientists still don’t agree on why the Mpemba effect occurs, and it’s difficult to reproduce the effect consistently. The new study is “a way of thinking of effects like the Mpemba effect from a different perspective,” says physicist Andrés Santos of Universidad de Extremadura in Badajoz, Spain, who was not involved with the research.
Feb 25, 2020...
Israeli researchers and their European partners for the first time provided a detailed three-dimensional (3D) image of electron trajectories around a molecule, the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) in central Israel reported Friday.
The conventional image of an atom resembles a simple system of sun and planets, namely a small positively-charged nucleus, and negative-charged electrons orbiting it in circular or elliptical paths.
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.
May 12, 2020...
For a single ant, the world can be an overwhelmingly big place. To safely navigate their environs, ants rely on collective cognition.
According to a new study, published Tuesday in the journal eLife, collective brainpower makes seemingly chaotic environs navigable.
“Cooperation is a common means by which animals can increase their cognitive capacity, and we were intrigued as to whether this cooperation allows ants to extend the range of environments in which they can efficiently collect food,” first study author Aviram Gelblum, a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said in a news release.
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.
May 15, 2020...
In the search for life beyond Earth, Israel Space Agency (ISA) is among four finalists chosen by NASA to develop concept studies in NASA's Discovery Program for new missions. The ISA's proposal is to launch an investigative mission to Neptune's largest moon, Triton.
Each of the four finalists, who were selected out of a group of 22, is set to receive $3 million in the coming year to develop their plans before two are selected for missions.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/nasa-s-next-destination/
May 14, 2020...
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—May 14, 2020—An incredibly accurate clock planned by the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Israel Space Agency (ISA), and an Israeli company could be on its way to Neptune’s largest moon in 2026.
If life does exist outside of Earth in our Solar System, it could be hiding in subterranean oceans flowing under the surface of icy moons. One of the most promising candidates for such an underground liquid body is Triton – aptly named for the son of the sea god Neptune, the planet around which it orbits. Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, some 4.5 billion km (2.8 million miles) away, is an oddity: it orbits in the opposite direction from all of Neptune’s other moons. Some think this points to an origin outside of our Solar System: the moon may be an intruder that was trapped long ago by Neptune’s gravitational field.
May 20, 2020...
While some people see ants as a nuisance, others of us are fascinated by them. How do such tiny, vulnerable creatures navigate this harsh, gigantic world and accomplish such disproportionally outsized feats? (Speaking of disproportionally outsized feats: the most recent studies on how much an ant can carry put it at 5,000 times their own weight!)
Prof. Ofer Feinerman in the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Physics of Complex Systems – and what better describes ant society than “complex system?” – has long studied ants, and clearly admires them. He says that casual observance, like watching a line of ants cross a sidewalk, doesn’t even begin to reveal their sophistication: “their numbers, cooperative skills, efficiency, apparent know-how, and elegance are just too difficult to miss.”
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