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Guest Post: The Scent of a Handshake
Posted by weizmann science writer on March 3, 2015 Today’s guest blogger is Idan Frumin, a student in the group of Prof. Noam Sobel in the Neurobiology Department. Their research on the transmission of odor compounds while shaking hands appears today in eLife. It all started one day after lunch, sometime back in 2011. We sat in the lab’s living room (Yeah, we have…
The Poetry of Science IV
Posted by weizmann science writer on February 26, 2015 With a skull and Keats, there was little choice but to write about the new online items in rhyme. So with apologies to Shakespeare, Keats and the scientists, as well as the people at SpaceIL, here are today’s grab bag of poems. As usual, follow the links. On a Lone Cranium Alas…
Getting the Whole Picture
Posted by weizmann science writer on February 12, 2015 What’s in a picture? Prof. Benny Shilo knows the value of a good picture. We recently mentioned his book: Life’s Blueprint, which uses photographs of things like bread dough and yeast cells to illustrate the process of biological development. Here is the image from the most recent piece we have uploaded on his research: This…
Q&A with Prof. Nir Orion on Out-of-Classroom Teaching
Posted by weizmann science writer on January 26, 2015 Science Teaching researcher Prof. Nir Orion recently returned from Peru, where his award-winning Blue Planet teaching unit was adopted by the Peruvian Ministry of Education Q: You have been working for many years to get schoolchildren out of the classroom setting. Why? A: Schools in general and science teaching in particular are supposed to teach…
Luring Stem Cells Down the Right Path
Posted by weizmann science writer on December 24, 2014 Getting cells to revert to a stem-like state – creating so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells – was a true revolution, but the technique invented in 2006 is only half the game. The first challenges include getting enough adult cells to undergo the “reprogramming” in culture to be of use and removing those traces of…
Bat Brains and the Nobel Prize
Posted by weizmann science writer on December 10, 2014 Not everyone gets their research written about by this week’s Nobel Prize winners: All mammals face the challenge of navigating in complex, three-dimensional (3D) environments, whether they are swinging from branch-to-branch in forests or burrowing underground tunnels. How does the brain maintain a sense of place and direction in 3D? In a beautiful study published…
Sulfur: As You Like It
Posted by weizmann science writer on November 18, 2014 Speaking of sulfur: This common element turns out to be highly useful for understanding planetary processes – both on Earth and Mars. Two new papers by Dr. Itay Halevy use sulfur chemistry to understand the history of sulfur-loving microbes at the bottom of the ocean and the compounds spewed from Martian volcanoes that may have…
Sleep Learning with Smell Could Reduce Addiction
Posted by weizmann science writer on November 12, 2014 Get rid of your addictions while you sleep? Weizmann Institute researcher Dr. Anat Arzi is not promising this yet, but she and Prof. Noam Sobel have shown that changing bad habits through sleep conditioning could someday be possible. After just one session in the Neurobiology Department’s sleep lab, volunteers reported smoking on average 30% fewer…
Life’s Blueprint
Posted by weizmann science writer on October 29, 2014 A new book will make you stop and think about the relationship between the microscopic world and the one we pass by every day. Life’s Blueprint – The Science and Art of Embryo Creation; Benny Shilo, Yale University Press, 174 pages. When a stem cell divides, one daughter maintains the stem cell fate while the…
Resetting Our Biological Clocks
Posted by weizmann science writer on October 21, 2014 To all bits of clockwork that are adjusted in our bodies according to our day-night timetable, we can now add two more: cancer growth and the schedules of our internal complements of bacteria. Cancer, according to a new Weizmann Institute study, may grow and spread more at night. In this scenario, our cells are getting…