jhalper
Posts by this author
May 20, 2012
You might not think of cell suicide as a sexy subject - but it is actually quite hot. Cells off themselves for any number of reasons: In embryonic development, cell suicide helps shape the growing organism. In adults, suicide is the last resort of a cell whose DNA is too damaged to repair, and its…
May 14, 2012
Sometime around junior high, this Weizmann science writer stumbled upon Mathematical Games, the late Martin Gardner's monthly math puzzle at the back of my mom's Scientific American, and I became a devotee. The best ones, of course, were those that required a little sideways thinking, and these…
May 1, 2012
No, the woman with the microphone is not crooning lounge songs to customers. That is Prof. Deborah Fass, and she is explaining the latest structural biology research in her lab.
And this is Weizmann Institute president Prof. Daniel Zajfman in an official Science on Tap 2012 T shirt giving pub…
April 15, 2012
Explain to a pub full of beer drinkers exactly what it is you do in your lab. That's the idea behind Science on Tap, which will be taking place again this year in bars, coffee shops and restaurants in the heart of Tel Aviv's entertainment district at the end of the month.
A Science on Tap…
April 1, 2012
Have you given any thought to your retirement? Planning on pottering? Catching up on reading? Thinking you'll cross that bridge when you come to it?
According to Prof. Bernardo Vidne, retirement can be more like jumping out of a plane than crossing a bridge - even if you are prepared. The story of…
March 25, 2012
Earthquakes are once again in the news, this time in Mexico. Although it is only the biggest quakes that make international headlines, we might take a minute to contemplate other quakes - the ones you'll never feel. So-called "slow" or "silent" earthquakes slip so softly they don't even show up on…
March 11, 2012
The patterns of the dark craters on the near side of the Moon have spurred the imagination of observers from all cultures: Some visualize a woman, others a rabbit, or, like most of us, they see the "Man in the Moon."
Near side
The explanation as to why we always see the Man in the Moon - that is,…
March 11, 2012
A somewhat accidental discovery and random meetings between proteins in a cell: These are the subjects of two new online articles. Each, it its way, involves a technological advance that will, in turn, lead to further scientific discovery.
The first involves a partnership between a physics group…
March 5, 2012
What would you say are the strongest three factors associated with the salaries of major-league baseball players? According to a popular, well-established algorithm, the main influential factors are walks, intentional walks and runs batted in.
How much does he earn?
But a paper recently published…
February 23, 2012
DNA testing can reveal how closely related you are to a group of people halfway around the world or, if you're doing evolutionary research, where organisms fit on taxonomic trees. The same DNA tests, when performed on the cells in a single human body, can be used to reconstruct lineage trees that…
February 16, 2012
At age 28, theoretical physicist Dr. Zohar Komargodski became head of a research group in the Institute's Particle Physics and Astrophysics Department. A recent paper, published with Prof. Adam Schwimmer of the Physics of Complex Systems Department, made some waves in the physics world with a…
January 15, 2012
YEDA Research and Development Company LTD., the commercial arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science, today announced it has entered into a license agreement with Adobe Systems Incorporated related to a bidirectional similarity measure to summarize visual data.
Here are some examples:
Before:…
January 11, 2012
Plaster from human dwellings or the signs of a long-abandoned animal enclosure? Tuesday's New York Times describes the collaboration between a chemist - structural biologist Prof. Steve Weiner, who is head of the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science at the Weizmann Institute -…
January 8, 2012
The actors on the stage work their magic, turning a few disparate phrases - "challenge, giving birth, infinity, chaos, visiting a new country" - into a brief but charming improvised sketch, to the delight of the audience. But the viewers, filling a large auditorium at the Weizmann Institute of…
December 26, 2011
Often, simply identifying the structure of a potential drug target protein and designing a molecule to block it are not enough. Just ask Prof. Irit Sagi, a chemist turned biology researcher, who recently developed a clever technique for directing the body to design its own protein-blocking…
December 14, 2011
Is it possible to perform operations on encrypted data, while keeping it secure from all prying eyes (or circuits), even if that data is stored remotely, in the "cloud?" Will our end result still be encrypted, and when we decode it with our private decryption key, will our result be correct? To put…
December 13, 2011
The Weizmann Institute's Prof. Eilam Gross is currently the ATLAS Higgs physics group convener. He originally wrote this piece in Hebrew for the Yediot Aharonot daily.
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…
December 12, 2011
If you followed this year's chemistry Nobel, you know about the quasicrystal design on the ties made for Prof. Dan Schechtman's 70th birthday. Even the prime minister was seen sporting one last week. But did you know there is also a quasicrystal scarf?
While Prof. Schechtman was getting his white…
November 28, 2011
This week's new Weizmann science stories are on ants and bats. Two different models for investigating human behavior? Yes, but not exactly in the ways you might imagine, and so much more than that.
Dr. Ofer Feinerman, the "ant scientist," is a new member of the Physics Faculty. In his graduate…
November 13, 2011
Proteins are strung together from amino acids attached in long chains, one after the other. But for most proteins, this is just the beginning - next they must fold. "Folding" is the general term for the way that a protein strand twists, coils, winds, pleats and creases into an intricate three-…
November 1, 2011
In this country, as in much of the Western world, we are constantly bemoaning slipping scores in math and science. So here's a bit of good news: The first 26 science teachers to participate in the Rothschild-Weizmann Program for Excellence in Science Teaching will be receiving their degrees in…
October 8, 2011
Five articles (plus some photos from the recent Researchers' Night activities) are now online in the fall issue of Interface magazine (the Weizmann Institute's "friendly" science magazine).
â¢Read about a new kind of water treatment system - one that breaks down such complex, man-made chemicals in…
September 25, 2011
The olfactory membranes in your nose are densely packed with smell receptors. These receptors come in some 400 different subtypes; complex odors like that of rose petals can waft around 175 distinct kinds of odor molecules in the direction of your nose. In other words, the number of discrete odors…
September 18, 2011
Our latest annual report is now online, and we think the results are worth looking at. We started with a favorite theme -- art and science -- and took it a step further. Ten short pieces on scientific research that deals with movement -- of proteins, electrons, black holes or theoretical random…
September 12, 2011
Last month, Penn Medicine put out a press release heralding a "cancer treatment breakthrough 20 years in the making." In a small clinical trial, three patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) were treated with genetically engineered versions of their own T cells. Just a few weeks…
August 28, 2011
A recent study by Prof. Ernesto Joselevich and his team, published in Science, features perfectly aligned horizontal arrays of thin, millimeter-long nanowires. We spoke with Joselevich recently to find out why he and others in the field are excited by this advance:
WSW: Your lab has produced a…
August 15, 2011
Dr. Nachum Ulanovsky of the Weizmann Institute and Prof. Ran Nathan and Asaf Tsoar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have captured live fruit bats and glued tiny GPS transmitters to their backs, then driven the bats overnight to a site some 80 kilometers away and rappelled into the bats' caves…
August 9, 2011
What does a tiny patch of salamander retina see when it watches a movie? Weizmann Institute scientists, together with Dr. Ronen Segev at Ben-Gurion University, performed this experiment - literally showing film sequences to snippets of live retina tissue and recording the interactions between their…
July 29, 2011
One Thursday evening near the end of July, people sitting outside a local ice cream parlor watched a neurobiology Ph.D. student wave his hand in front of his face in imitation of a robot learning to sense itself as separate from its surroundings. Despite the trains arriving at the station in the…
July 23, 2011
Today's science news from the Weizmann Institute covers research in neurobiology, environmental science and cancer immunology.
⢠In the first, scientists identified a likely biological marker for autism that shows up even in very young children. Diagnoses of autism are generally not possible so…