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 future of humanity.
Aug 11, 2009...
NEW YORK—Three Ethiopian teens, part of the Jewish Agency's Sparks of Science program, were in Turkey last week at an international space camp run in partnership with NASA.
The teens were sent at the initiative of the Jewish Agency and the Weizmann Institute and are part of an Israeli delegation of high school students.
The Jewish Agency's Sparks of Science program provides academic enrichment for Ethiopian high school students with classes in science, technology, math, and English at Israel's top academic institutions, including the renowned Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot; classes are taught by Weizmann faculty and tutoring sessions by students.
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.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/fire-and-ice-on-mars/
Dec 09, 2014... About 4.5 billion of years ago, in a small solar system with a rather weak sun, were two “Goldilocks” planets. That’s what scientists call planets that could harbor life: not so hot as to burn it up, not so cold as to be prohibitive, but temperate: just right. The two planets had similar conditions – comparable basic elements, age, geography – and yet life formed on one and not the other. One became oxygenated, and became our Earth; the other became desiccated, and we call it Mars.
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]
Jul 25, 2012... The research of the Weizmann Institute's Prof. Oded Aharonson focuses on planetary geology, geophysics, and dynamics; here, he shares his discoveries from Titan, an icy moon of Saturn.
Nov 07, 2014...
Artist's rendering of the SpaceIL Google Lunar XPrize spacecraft conducting its mission. Credit: SpaceIL
Eran Privman, CEO of SpaceIL, authored this article with contributions from mission scientist Oded Aharonson and SpaceIL science team investigator Avi Barliya. The authors contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
With the goal of landing the first Israeli spacecraft on the moon, nonprofit SpaceIL is competing for the Google Lunar XPrize: a modern race to the moon. The competition promises a $20-million grand prize to the first nongovernmental team to soft-land an unmanned spacecraft on the moon, travel 500 meters (1640 feet) across the surface, and send high-resolution images and video back to Earth.
Nov 17, 2014...
Research suggests that warmth and water flow on ancient Mars (illustration shown) were probably episodic. These temperature changes may have also been related to brief periods of volcanic activity that spewed tons of greenhouse-inducing sulphur dioxide gas into the atmosphere
Evidence of rivers, streams, and lakes suggests that Mars was, at some point, warm enough for liquid water to flow on its surface, according to a new study.
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.
Jan 29, 2019...
Israeli scientists participate in an experiment simulating a mission to Mars, at the D-MARS Desert Mars Analog Ramon Station project, February 18, 2018. \ RONEN ZVULUN/ REUTERS
The race to land humans on Mars is on again – and at an accelerated pace. Superpowers including China and the United States have declared their intentions to land astronauts on the Red Planet, as have private entrepreneurs who are taking the challenge seriously, among them Elon Musk.
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