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/in-the-news/the-physicist-who-denies-dark-matter/
May 18, 2017...
Mordehai Milgrom Credit: Weizmann Institute of Science
“He is one of those dark matter people,” Mordehai Milgrom said about a colleague stopping by his office at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Milgrom introduced us, telling me that his friend is searching for evidence of dark matter in a project taking place just down the hall.
“There are no ‘dark matter people’ and ‘MOND people,’ ” his colleague retorted.
Jul 05, 2017... The remnants of supernova 1987A show newly formed dust in the center (red) surrounded by the supernova’s shock wave as it collides with gas around the supernova (blue and green). The image here is a composite of images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope in Chile (red), the Hubble Space Telescope (green) and Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue). NASA, ESA, and A. Angelich (NRAO)
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/how-the-mighty-winds-of-uranus-and-neptune-blow/
May 15, 2013...
This image of Uranus was obtained in 2005 by the Hubble Space Telescope. Rings, southern collar and a bright cloud in the northern hemisphere are visible. CREDIT: NASA, ESA, and M. Showalt
These findings could shed light on how those immensely strong winds are born, and how giant planets form and evolve over time, scientists added.
Giant planets in the outer solar system, like Uranus and Neptune, are dominated by winds that can reach supersonic speeds and jet streams 10 to 15 times stronger than those found on Earth, judging by images of how clouds race by on those worlds. However, just how deep those winds reached was unknown until now, hidden as those lower depths are beneath those dense layers of clouds. [Photos of Uranus from near and far]
Jun 08, 2017...
A simulation based on models used by aerospace engineers revealed the existence of shockwaves in the beams due to interactions with the “warm” skimmers
The tiny cone-shaped “skimmers” used in experiments looking for exotic chemical-quantum phenomena resemble the intake mechanisms of aircraft engines, and they perform similar functions: each directs the flow of gas – the engine intake controls the supply of air for burning fuel, and the “skimmer” creates beams of cold flying atoms or molecules. While skimmers have been a necessary component in atomic and molecular-beam experiments for decades, they were also known to impose a fundamental limit on the number of particles one could pack into the beam. However, Prof. Edvardas Narevicius and his team in the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Chemical Physics have now revealed a simple way to overcome this limit.
May 08, 2019... Meet physicist Prof. Erez Berg, the 2019 Physical Sciences & Engineering Laureate of the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. Prof. Berg has conducted influential studies to gain insights into quantum materials—materials whose electronic properties cannot be characterized by traditional physics. His research holds major promise for devising new ways of storing and manipulating quantum information, with implications for a new computing age, as well as next-generation electronics, superconducting power lines, and MRI technologies. The Blavatnik Awards, presented by The Blavatnik Family Foundation, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (IASH), recognize early-career scientists and engineers in Israel for both their extraordinary achievements and promise for future discoveries. Of the three 2019 laureates, two were from the Weizmann Institute; the other Weizmann winner was Dr. Michal Rivlin of the Department of Neurobiology. Video courtesy of the New York Academy of Sciences.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/science-tips-november-2013/
Nov 25, 2013... Chromosomes — the 46 tightly wrapped packages of genetic material in our cells — are iconically depicted as X-shaped formations. However, those neat X’s only appear when a cell is about to divide and the entire contents of its genome duplicated. Until now, researchers have not been able to get a good picture of the way that our DNA — some two meters of strands, all told — is neatly bundled into the nucleus while enabling day-to-day (non-dividing) gene activity. A combination of new techniques for sequencing DNA in individual chromosomes and analyzing data from thousands of measurements has given us a new picture of the three-dimensional (3D) structures of chromosomes. This method, reported recently in Nature, is the result of an international collaboration that promises to help researchers understand the basic processes by which gene expression is regulated and genome stability is maintained.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/science-tips-july-2007/
Jul 26, 2007...
A New Technique May Speed the Development of Molecular Electronics
Often, things can be improved by a little “contamination.” Steel, for example, is iron with a bit of carbon mixed in. To produce materials for modern electronics, small amounts of impurities are introduced into silicon—a process called doping. It is these impurities that enable electricity to flow through the semiconductor and allow designers to control the electronic properties of the material.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/lighting-up-the-mechanisms-of-brain-disease/
Mar 28, 2017...
It was late 2005, and Dr. Ofer Yizhar was busily conducting neurobiology research at Tel Aviv University for his doctorate, unaware that his life plans were about to change, when a fellow doctoral student burst into the lab, a scientific paper in hand.
“You won’t believe what they did in this paper,” he told Dr. Yizhar, who was surprised to read that scientists were able to genetically modify a neuron – a brain cell – to make it sensitive to light.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/science-tips-march-2013/
Mar 18, 2013... For years, scientists around the world have dreamed of building a complete, functional, artificial cell. Though this vision is still a distant blur on the horizon, many are making progress on various fronts. Prof. Roy Bar-Ziv and his research team in the Weizmann Institute’s Materials and Interfaces Department recently took a significant step in this direction when they created a two-dimensional, cell-like system on a glass chip. This system, composed of some of the basic biological molecules found in cells — DNA, RNA, proteins — carried out one of the central functions of a living cell: gene expression, the process by which the information stored in the genes is translated into proteins. More than that, it enabled the scientists, led by research student Yael Heyman, to obtain “snapshots” of this process in nanoscale resolution.
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.
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