Here are some examples:

Before:

After:

For more information, see our press release or Prof. Irani's website.

But even as that article appeared, hi-tech archaeology at the Institute was getting kicked up a fairly large notch. On Wednesday, the presidents of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science and the Weizmann Institute, Profs. Peter Gruss and Daniel Zajfman, signed an agreement to open a new center for collaborative archaeology research. The research will be carried out at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Among the technological wonders that will be used to reveal the microscopic finer points of relics from pottery to teeth will be a big-ticket piece of equipment that is being constructed especially for the purpose and is slated to be installed in a physics facility sometime this year. This accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) can be used for radiocarbon dating with an accuracy of a few tens of years; and it can pick out one carbon atom in a quadrillion (ten to the 15th). According to Dr. Elisabetta Boaretto, the Kimmel Center's radiocarbon dating expert, it will be able to accurately date a single lentil or grain of wheat.

Other research will make use of Weiner's experience in investigating modern materials - specifically teeth. His studies of the microstructure of modern human teeth have revealed how they stand up to the daily pressures of chewing. Now, similar analyses will be used to examine the evolution of teeth in our nearest ancestors.

Indeed. Combining his two passions, science and theater, Alon has recently created a "theater lab" on the Weizmann campus, as part of the Institute's new Human Brain and Mind Program. The "lab" is a twice-weekly workshop that brings together Weizmann scientists and actors from the Kartoshkes Ensemble Playback Theater, in an attempt to subject to rigorous scientific analysis topics that are not always easy to define, let alone quantify - creativity, spontaneity, togetherness.

Sagi studies an enzyme called matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9). This protein, along with other members of the MMP family, cleaves straight through the support tissues in the body - collagen and the extracellular matrix that gives organs and tissues structure. This, of course is crucial for everything from wound healing to cell mobility but when dysregulated, MMP-9 in particular often finds its skills subverted to cancer metastasis and autoimmune syndromes. Sagi knows this protein inside out - she has investigated its active site, used innovative structural methods she developed in her lab to observe the dynamic conformations it goes through when activated, and identified weak points in the structure. Blocking the protein was not the main challenge. The problem lay in creating a selective molecule that would only block MMP-9 and not its many sister enzymes, all of which have a similar, metal-ion-based setup in their active sites. At least one small molecule blocker for this enzyme even made it to clinical trials, but the side effects were severe: Apparently it obstructed the activity of too many other MMP enzymes.

The idea for an alternative approach arose when Dr. Netta Sela-Passwell was an M.Sc. student on Sagi's lab. Instead of directly attacking the enzyme, the scientists looked for a way to trick the body's own regulatory system into stepping up activity. The plan was to design a synthetic molecule that would trigger an immune response against the metal-ion-based set up at the enzyme's active site.

left: natural enzyme blocker; right: novel antibody

In mice, the synthetic molecules Sagi and her lab team eventually created in collaboration with an organic chemistry group - pared-down versions of the enzyme's active site - performed as hoped: They significantly reduced symptoms of a Crohn's-like autoimmune disease. Interestingly enough, when the researchers checked the mice's blood, they found antibodies that were similar, but not identical to, inhibitors that the body normally produces to regulate the harmful activity of MMP-9. Testing these near-natural mouse antibodies on human versions of the enzyme revealed the same binding and blocking activity, and they only bound to one other member of the MMP family, rather than all of them.

Of course, the path from a method that works in mice to one that can be packaged as a drug for humans is long and treacherous. But Sagi and her team are excited by their finding - not just for its potential to treat a debilitating condition, but because it presents a whole new approach to dealing with human enzymes that are involved in promoting and abetting disease.

Welcome to the world of fully homomorphic encryption. The concept was first proposed in 1978 - long before the advent of remote computing services - by Rivest, Adelman and Dertouzos. (Rivest and Adelman, together with the Weizmann Institute's Prof. Adi Shamir, invented the RSA scheme used for almost all computer encryption today.) Since then, various researchers have come up with "partly homomorphic" methods, but none of them enabled full homomorphism. Only in 2009 was a fully homomorphic method demonstrated, by Craig Gentry at Stanford. That method, though proof of concept, was much too heavy and slow to be of any practical use.

Gentry published his method as his Ph.D. thesis. But it could be the doctoral work of another recent graduate - Dr. Zvika Brakerski from the Weizmann Institute (a student of Prof. Shafi Goldwasser) - that ultimately enables fully homomorphic encryption to become reality. Brakerski worked with Dr. Vinod Vaikuntanathan, a former student of Goldwasser's at MIT, who was at Microsoft Research at the time and is currently a professor at the University of Toronto.

In a nutshell: Gentry made some assumptions about the complexity of the math needed to achieve fully homomorphic encryption, and then used "a bit of a hack" (his words) to make it all work. Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan managed to change some of those assumptions (to "weaker" - more plausible and widely accepted - assumptions), simplifying the math and even eliminating the need for some of the hacks. The result, they say, is a method that is hundreds or even thousands of times faster than the original, but still fully homomorphic.

Brakerski, now doing postdoctoral research at Stanford, is continuing to research the math involved in fully homomorphic encryption. In the meantime, software engineers are already applying his insights to the future of data security.

Also today at the Weizmann Institute:
White blood cells that reach into the blood vessel lining looking for "exit signs" and the closest supernova observation in the past 25 years yields new insights into how stars explode.

The Best There Is - For Now

"The God Particle," as the Higgs boson is often called, comes from the title of the book by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman that deals with the search for the elusive particle. This particle, according to the Standard Model of Particle Physics, is responsible for giving mass to all of the elementary particles in nature.

The mass of an electron determines the size of a hydrogen atom; ultimately the size of atoms ensures, amazingly enough, our existence. Maybe this is the reason the Higgs has been treated with almost mystical reverence in the mass media.

The Higgs boson is the only one of the elementary particles making up the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has not yet been discovered. Its importance can't be denied. Many scientists believe that the Standard Model will stand or fall on the discovery of Higgs boson particles or proof that they don't exist.

Three weeks ago, I attended a conference called "Higgs hunting" in Paris. Nearly everyone who is involved in the search for this particle was there. I was the guest of my friend Marumi Kado. At some point after a wonderful, wine-filled dinner, Marumi suggested a glass of grappa. "You must," he said. "It is Prime Uve, the best there is." A few hours later, in the wee hours of the morning, Marumi nudged me awake from a deep sleep and said: "Eilam, do you want to see a Higgs?" Of course, I jumped up immediately: "What? Where?" "The computer has stopped running; here are the results," he said. On his computer screen were images from CERN. We were all in shock. Something was out of the ordinary at a mass of 126 GeV (a unit of mass close to that of a proton). Definitely significant - 3.6 standard deviations. We couldn't believe our eyes - we looked at the screen for ages before we started to digest what we were seeing. For the past three weeks, the entire Higgs search team in the ATLAS experiment have checked and rechecked the results from every possible angle. We checked for errors... for bugs in the program.

fig.1

While Prof. Schechtman was getting his white tie and tails ready for the formal ceremony, this scarf was on display in fashionable Tel Aviv around the shoulders of Prof. Gitti Frey, a nanoscientist at the Technion.

Dr. Ofer Feinerman, the "ant scientist," is a new member of the Physics Faculty. In his graduate research under Prof. Elisha Moses in the Physics of Complex Systems Department, Feinerman created artificial circuits out of neurons. Now he has turned to investigating the complexities of ant societies. What, you might ask, do neurons and ant colonies have to do with physics? The answer is: They involve non-linear, collective phenomena, similar to those studied extensively by physicists. (Moses has investigated everything from falling leaves and advancing wave fronts* to schizophrenia to deep patterns in literature.) So in this physics lab, instead of lasers or ion traps, there are high-tech ant farms where the inhabitants run around with miniature barcodes glued to their backs.

Photo: Lab of Dr. Ofer Feinerman

The sequence of amino acids is what determines the final shape of the protein: Molecules assembled on the same plan will end up in the exact same configuration. The funny thing is, they don't all go through the same set of steps to arrive at their final structure. Some of them, apparently, take shortcuts. It's as if you could skip a few steps in the origami instructions and still end up with a perfect paper crane in the end.

To observe and compare how individual protein strands fold, the Weizmann Institute's Prof. Gilad Haran and his team had to invent some new techniques, including fluorescent microscopy methods and data analysis that enabled them to collate thousands of individual events into a timeline of protein folding.

Experiments revealed multiple possible "paths" through a protein's folding landscape

The team identified six different intermediate configurations for the protein they studied. Sometimes the strands went through all of them; other times, they took an easier, shorter route to their final form.

Why would a molecule go through extra contortions to get to the same state? The findings contain a clue: The process became longer and more tortuous in the presence of some external factors such as heat or higher concentrations of certain chemicals in the protein's environment.

Like much good research, this study raises more questions than it answers: Is this a general rule that holds for different types of proteins? What advantages do the different routes to protein structure confer? How this might tie into such disorders as Alzheimer's disease, in which badly-folded proteins form plaques in brain tissue?

The idea of the program is simple: To improve science education, invest in the teachers. The Weizmann Institute invited high-school science and math teachers who already had a reputation for outstanding teaching to enroll in the three-year course of studies.
To find out more about the program, we spoke with Prof. Bat Sheva Eylon, Head of the Science Teaching Department.

WSW: How did you choose the teachers who participated in the program?

Eylon: We were not looking only at teachers' knowledge of science or math, but rather searched for the type of teacher who is willing to take up studies in a demanding program, who is motivated to get the student interested, who is passionate about their subject, who wants to contribute to developing and advancing science education. In our interviews, we scouted out those who were ready for the challenge.

For those excellent teachers who already have advanced degrees, by the way, we initiated an additional track in the program, as we also want to capitalize on these teachers' potential to advance the educational system. They also need the opportunity to further their professional abilities.

• Read about a new kind of water treatment system - one that breaks down such complex, man-made chemicals in water as cleaning fluids, flame retardants and pesticide residues, turning them into simpler compounds that can then degrade naturally into harmless substances. Today, there is little that can be done about these pollutants, which are considered dangerous even in tiny amounts when they get into the water supply.

But research by Prof. Noam Sobel and his team in the Weizmann Neurobiology Department is bringing our noses into line with our other sensory organs. The arrangement of the photoreceptors in our eyes, for instance, is set up to relay spatial information to the brain. And the membranes in our inner ears are graded by tone.

Sobel provided one piece of the puzzle several years ago when he revealed that odors can be placed on a scale that runs from sweetly pleasant to highly disagreeable. His research linked the apparently subjective - how volunteers rated a smell - to the objective - the chemical structure of an odor molecule. Once he had cracked the secrets of the scale, he could then predict how people smelling a scent for the first time would rate it.

Now he and his team have shown that, like the sensory receptors in our eyes and ears, smell receptors are also arranged in patterns that reflect a rational scale. In other words, they identified separate regions in the olfactory membrane; each responds most actively to one part of the pleasantness scale. While there are, of course, many more dimensions to smell than pleasantness, the scale seems to be an organizational framework that is hardwired into our brain. To Sobel, it makes sense that our basic sense of smell is both innate and based on pleasantness: A bad smell is an instinctive, universal signal to us that we need to avoid its source.

What is she smelling? The recording reveals the answer. A volunteer demonstrates the experimental apparatus for detecting olfactory neuron activity

The Insomniac City Cycles Ran Slavin
Still from film, 2004-2009

It might all seem a bit exuberant, in light of continuing economic crises and regional politics. But if you read between the lines, you will see that excellent research is alive and well at the Weizmann Institute. And that, these days, is an accomplishment in itself.

The release didn't, however, explain those "20 years in the making." In 1989, Prof. Zelig Eshhar of the Weizmann Institute's Immunology Department first published a paper describing a method of creating gene-modified T cells by adding on chimeric molecules that functioned as receptors with the specificity of an antibody. The idea, from the beginning, was that these immune cells could be programmed to identify and coordinate an attack against such cells as cancer cells, which generally manage to evade the immune system. The engineering method used by the Penn team is the one Eshhar began developing in the 1980s. For Eshhar, the new study is proof of concept; it had previously been shown to work in mice. Now that the method has been successfully used in humans - and the results even better than anyone dared hope - it can be tried on a wider scale for other types of cancer.

If the idea seems futuristic now, it was downright science fiction, then. More importantly, those first chimeric T cells were created in a lab dish and sent off to attack other cells in a lab dish. Those twenty years reflect the time it takes to move from a revolutionary idea that works in the lab to a medical treatment that works on humans. In light of the many potential anti-cancer treatments that fail somewhere along the way from lab to clinic, the new study is a triumph both for the Penn team and for Eshhar and his team.

This is clearly the place to repeat our mantra about basic research: It is a long-term undertaking. There are no guarantees. No one can predict where a specific line of inquiry will eventually lead, or when. Without basic research and vision, there will be no innovative new cancer treatments.

Eshhar, by the way, recently improved on the genetically engineered T cell idea by creating them from a non-matched donor pool, rather than cells extracted from the individual patient. In mouse experiments, he and his team temporarily suppressed the immune system with a mild dose of radiation and then administered the donor chimeric T cells. Because the method destroys tumors so quickly and effectively, these cells had time to finish the job before the immune system came back online and rejected them.

How long will it take for this improved method to reach the clinic? For our answer, see paragraph four. Or keep posted here.

WSW: Your lab has produced a fair amount of innovative research in recent years. Why is this one special?

EJ: First of all, we succeeded in growing very long horizontal nanowires with exquisite control over their orientation. Because of the numerous potential uses for semiconductor nanowires, there is a lot of competition to create better ones with more efficient processes. We even managed to demonstrate control over the orientation of the atoms within the nanowires.

WSW: What is unique in your method?

EJ: Basically, we provided the nanowires with guidelines to direct their growth - something like stakes for vines. Rather than a tangled mess, we can grow them in neat, straight lines. Our nanowires are made of gallium nitride deposited on an artificial sapphire surface. This sort of deposition is used today to create the thin semiconductor films in blue LEDs or the violet lasers used in Blu-ray discs. This technology was developed in the 1970s, but it took another 30 years to figure out how to reduce the defects in the crystal enough to make them useful.

More recently, gallium nitride nanowires have been grown vertically. The problem here is that the process of harvesting them and creating arrays is messy and inefficient, leading to relatively short and poorly aligned nanowires. With our method, you can grow the nanowires horizontally, in ready-made arrays.

WSW: How does the method work?

EJ: Rather than producing the wires on a smooth surface, we created stepped and grooved surfaces for them to grow along. We found that if we cut the sapphire in certain directions and heated it to around 1,500° C, the surface wrinkled into nice parallel steps and grooves. The nanowires were then grown in the grooves in a vapor-liquid-solid process. We found that we could control the properties of the nanowires by controlling the planes of the grooves. That is, we could grow them in different directions with respect to the matrix of the substrate crystal. This, in turn, led to different orientations of the atoms within the nanowires themselves.

WSW: What was surprising about this research?

EJ: It is not a given that one can grow one crystalline material on top of another crystal (sapphire) without introducing defects. We had previously grown nanotubes on uneven sapphire surfaces, but carbon nanotubes hardly react with the sapphire. In the case of the gallium nitride wires, one would expect to see much more influence of the substrate on the crystal structure.

In fact, our nanowires are surprisingly relaxed - they show none of the stress found in the semiconductor films of this material. We think the reason is that the long, thin wires can easily shrink or swell sideways to fit into the surface features, something that a two-dimensional film can't do. So our nanowires turn out to have few defects and excellent electrical and optical properties.

WSW: What about applications?

EJ: There is a long list of potential applications. In fact, we know how to use nanowires; the need already exists. And since, control of structure and miniaturization go hand in hand in the semiconductor industry, this method could well become standard within the decade.