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.
Apr 14, 2011... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—April 14, 2011—AnInternational team of scientists in the XENON collaboration, includingseveral from the Weizmann Institute, announced on Thursday the resultsof their search for the elusive component of our universe known as darkmatter. This search was conducted with greater sensitivity than everbefore. After one hundred days of data collection in the XENON100experiment, carried out deep underground at the Gran Sasso NationalLaboratory of the INFN, in Italy, they found no evidence for theexistence of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles – or WIMPs – theleading candidates for the mysterious dark matter. The three candidateevents they observed were consistent with two they expected to see frombackground radiation. These new results reveal the highest sensitivityreported as yet by any dark matter experiment, while placing thestrongest constraints on new physics models for particles of darkmatter. Weizmann Institute professors Eilam Gross, Ehud Duchovni andAmos Breskin, and research student Ofer Vitells, made significantcontributions to the findings by introducing a new statistical methodthat both increases the search sensitivity and enables new discovery.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/camera-sees-through-skin-around-corners/
Oct 21, 2012...
Weizmann Institute researchers Ori Katz, left, and Eran Small.
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, have discovered a new physics trick. While it's not exactly Superman vision — yet — the camera developed by Ori Katz, Eran Small and Prof. Yaron Silberberg sees through objects using a simple light bulb, a standard digital camera and the basic technology found in everyday digital projectors.
Oct 31, 2017...
An artist’s impression shows two tiny but very dense neutron stars at the point at which they merge and explode as a kilonova. (ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser)
In October, LIGO and its European counterpart, VIRGO, witnessed gravitational waves rippling out from a breathtaking collision between two neutron stars. This unprecedented event looked like yet another triumph for a new kind of astronomy, one that could use gravitational waves to probe some of the universe’s deepest mysteries. But in all the excitement, most people didn’t notice that something had died: a whole group of theories that posit a universe with no dark matter.
May 10, 2015...
Avital Dery. (photo credit:GUY NIR FOR ISRAEL ACADEMY OF THE SCIENCES AND ARTS)
Thirty-two-year-old Avital Dery, a doctoral student in physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, was selected at the end of last week to represent Israel in the British Council’s prestigious international FameLab competition at the Cheltenham Science Festival next month.
She was selected from among five contestants by giving an excellent three-minute lecture in her scientific field. Dery is investigating elementary particles. She also sings and performs classical music throughout the country.
Jul 04, 2012...
Illustration of a particle collision.
The long and complicated journey to detect the Higgs boson, which started with one small step about 25 years ago, might finally have reached its goal. This was reported by Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator scientists on July 4 at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, near Geneva.
Named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, the Higgs boson is the final building block that has been missing from the “Standard Model,” which describes the structure of matter in the universe. The Higgs boson combines two forces of nature and shows that they are, in fact, different aspects of a more fundamental force. The particle is also responsible for the existence of mass in the elementary particles.
Nov 29, 2015...
Prof. Reshef Tenne
A report on a fundamentally new and unprecedented molecular closed-cage nanostructure, produced by immensely concentrated sunlight was published recently by a team combining researchers in Beersheba, Rehovot and Russia. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Profs. Jeffrey Gordon and Daniel Feuermann, Prof. Reshef Tenne’s group at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Dr. Andrey Enyashin at the Ural Federal University explained their work in a recent issue of one of the foremost journals in nanotechnology, ACS Nano.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/looking-for-life-in-the-multiverse/
Dec 16, 2009... The typical Hollywood action hero skirts death for a living. Time and again, scores of bad guys shoot at him from multiple directions but miss by a hair. Cars explode just a fraction of a second too late for the fireball to catch him before he finds cover. And friends come to the rescue just before a villain's knife slits his throat. If any one of those things happened just a little differently, the hero would be hasta la vista, baby. Yet even if we have not seen the movie before, something tells us that he will make it to the end in one piece.
Feb 14, 2013...
Andromeda galaxy, or M31. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The predicted property in this study is the velocity dispersion, which is the average velocity of objects within a galaxy relative to each other. Astronomers can use velocity dispersion to determine the accelerations of objects within the galaxy and, roughly, the mass of a galaxy, and vice-versa.
To calculate the velocity dispersion for each dwarf galaxy, the researchers utilized Modified Newtonian Dynamics, MOND for short, which is a hypothesis that attempts to resolve what appears to be an insufficient amount of mass in galaxies needed to support their orbital speeds.
Feb 04, 2010... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—February 4, 2010—The best way to track a moving object with a flashlight might be to aim it to one side, catching the object in the edge of the beam rather than the center. New research from the Weizmann Institute of Science reveals that bats, which "see" with beams of sound waves, skew their beams off-center when they want to locate an object. The research, which recently appeared in Science, shows that this strategy is the most efficient for locating objects.
Mar 16, 2016...
The Juno space probe near Jupiter. Photo by www.shutterstock.com
An atomic clock – designed and constructed in Israel – will be carried beyond the Earth’s orbit as part of a mission planned by the European Space Agency (ESA).
The ESA mission, known as JUICE – JUpiter ICy moons Explorer – will spend at least three years making detailed observations of the solar system’s largest planet and three of its largest moons. Jupiter is known to have 67 moons.
©2022 American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science
FOR THE FOURTH CONSECUTIVE YEAR