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.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/video-gallery/2018-international-safe-cracking-tournament/
Apr 17, 2018... The Davidson Institute of Science Education’s International Physics Tournament challenges teams of high school students from around the world to design impenetrable safes. Each spring, the teams travel to the Weizmann campus in Israel, where they compete to unlock one another’s safes by solving the underlying physics riddles. On March 20-21, 2018, six teams—hailing from the Atlanta Jewish Academy in Atlanta, GA; Bruriah High School in Elizabeth, NJ; Green Valley High School in Henderson, NV; the Gregory School in Tucson, AZ; the Emery/Weiner School in Houston, TX; and Rancho High School in Las Vegas, NV—represented the United States at the 23rd annual competition. The American students joined other teams from countries such as England, Argentina, Romania, Canada, and Angola.
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.
Jan 13, 2016...
Prof. Yoseph Imry, one of this year's Wolf Prize winners (GPO)
Who will win this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine, the sciences, or the arts? No one will know, of course, until the award envelopes are opened later this year, but some of those potential winners – or at least the nominees – were feted at the Knesset Wednesday, as Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Israeli Nobel laureate Professor Dan Shechtman announced the winners of the 2016 Wolf Prizes.
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.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/criminals-aren-t-the-only-ones-breaking-in/
Nov 23, 2015...
Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas speaks at the Black Hat conference Thursday, Aug. 6, 2015, in Las Vegas. The annual computer security conference draws thousands of hackers and security professionals to Las Vegas. John Locher/AP
The word “hacker” might conjure thoughts of the Edward Snowden, Ashley Madison or Sony Pictures data breaches.
Generally, hackers are people who illegally break into computers to gain unauthorized access to data.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/chasing-the-higgs-boson/
Mar 05, 2013...
Peter Higgs, center, of the University of Edinburgh, was one of the first to propose the particle’s existence. From left, physicists at CERN who helped lead the hunt for it: Sau Lan Wu, Joe Incandela, Guido Tonelli and Fabiola Gianotti. Illustration by Sean McCabe/Photographs by Daniel Auf der Mauer, Toni Albir, Fabrice Coffrini, Fred Merz
MEYRIN, Switzerland — Vivek Sharma missed his daughter.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/jerusalem-tower-younger-than-thought/
Jun 16, 2017...
Recently uncovered remains of a massive stone tower built to guard Gihon Spring – a vital water supply just downhill from the ancient city of Jerusalem
Gihon Spring, just downhill from the ancient city of Jerusalem, was crucial to the survival of its inhabitants, and archaeologists had uncovered the remains of a massive stone tower built to guard this vital water supply. Based on pottery and other regional findings, the archaeologists had originally assigned it a date of 1,700 BCE. But new research conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science provides conclusive evidence that the stones at the base of the tower were laid nearly 1,000 years later. Among other things, the new results highlight the contribution of advanced scientific dating methods to understanding the history of the region.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/science-tips-september-2015/
Sep 01, 2015...
Tiny sea sapphires’ iridescence, created by a regular array of thin, transparent crystal plates, is also the secret of their “disappearance”
Tiny ocean creatures known as sea sapphires perform a sort of magic trick as they swim: One second they appear in splendid iridescent shades of blue, purple, or green, and the next they may turn invisible (at least the blue ones turn completely transparent). How do they get their bright colors and what enables them to “disappear?” New research at the Weizmann Institute of Science has solved the mystery of these colorful, vanishing creatures, which are known scientifically as Sapphirinidae. The findings, which recently appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, could inspire the development of new optical technologies.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/helping-to-map-geographic-tongue/
Apr 01, 2015...
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—A spiral series of self-sustaining cycles of excitation underlies the puzzling condition known geographic tongue, physicists suggest.
"Geographic tongue" refers to the red patches that appear when filiform papillae on the tongue are lost (they subsequently regrow). The condition affects about 2% of the population, but its exact cause is unknown.
"Utilizing a dynamical systems approach (i.e., a mathematical description of the dynamical aspect of the condition) allows one to get an insight regarding the evolution and severity of the geographic tongue (GT) condition," Dr. Gabriel Seiden from Weizmann Institute of Science's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Rehovot, Israel, told Reuters Health by email. "I hope that by combining our theoretical approach to GT with medical research we might better understand the underlying mechanism/cause of this intriguing medical condition."
Aug 01, 2019...
What is your field of study?
I did my doctorate in high-energy physics – particle physics – and my research is on astroparticles.
Could you explain to laypeople what that means?
As we all learned in high school, we are made of molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons and electrons. But we can actually go down to a more precise resolution because the protons and neutrons are composed of smaller particles, called quarks. And there are also a great many more particles that are created at very high energies. With particle accelerators – if they are particle accelerators such as the sun, gamma-ray bursts and supernovas –