jhalper
Posts by this author
July 6, 2011
Last year we were number two; this year we're back on top: The Scientist annual survey of the best places to work in academia has once again ranked the Weizmann Institute #1 outside of the US. Even more impressive, in the survey, in which statements were rated on a scale of 1-5 for disagree/agree,…
July 1, 2011
Do you ever doubt your own memory? New research at the Institute suggests that some of the things we think we remember could be wrong. It seems that our brains are surprisingly willing to exchange a true memory for a false one, just on the basis of friends' claims. The scientists not only…
June 13, 2011
The service tower attached to the iconic floating egg atop the Institute's Koffler accelerator (the "spaceship" in the photo, left) has recently been graced with a charming, shiny silver skullcap - an observatory dome. Formally known as the Martin Kraar Observatory, it houses two telescopes, and it…
May 30, 2011
Two completely unrelated papers have got us thinking about chemical bonds. When we refer to chemical bonds, we generally mean covalent bonds: Atoms become "wedded," sharing electrons, and breaking them apart takes energy. By comparison, other types of bonds are weak attractions - mere flirtations,…
May 24, 2011
This week's Weizmann news stories: A "steam release valve" for inflammation, a "brake" for cell division and an "amplifier" for quantum signals.
The steam release valve mechanism also involves an amplifier - one that ramps up the inflammation signal in response to viral attack on a cell. When the…
May 10, 2011
Disturbing experiences don't actually heighten our perceptions. In fact, according to new Weizmann research, in adverse conditions we're more likely to experience slightly different sights or sounds as being the same. The scientists think that this lumping together of similar sensory stimuli may be…
May 3, 2011
New research at the Institute sheds some light on a protein that could make it harder for overweight people to stick to a diet.
That protein helps regulate the effects of leptin - a hormone that reduces appetite and increases physical activity. People missing the leptin gene are invariably obese.…
April 26, 2011
The other week, while many Israelis stayed home to clean their kitchens before the upcoming Passover holiday and thousands of preteens were screaming themselves hoarse over Justin Bieber in a Tel-Aviv park, another sort of cultural event was taking place nearby. Following the success of the beer…
April 10, 2011
These guys are as adept with a lug wrench as they are with a mass spectrometer. Prof. Dan Yakir (second from right) and members of his group had to become licensed truck drivers to operate their newest equipment - which is all packed into a custom-built truck for hauling around the country. Until…
March 30, 2011
Today's Weizmann Institute news stories include two new papers from the prolific lab of Prof. Yadin Dudai. The first is on a protein that boosts memory in rats. Dudai and his group have been investigating this protein for several years. Previously, they had managed to show that blocking the protein…
March 22, 2011
Is having a beer and sandwich at the local pub the best way to improve your brain awareness? At least in the city of Rehovot one evening last week, those eating and drinking in a few select establishments got to hear Weizmann Institute neurobiology graduate students give informal talks and…
March 6, 2011
Dark matter - that invisible stuff that is supposed to make up some 20% of the Universe - was thought up to explain a puzzling observation. The amount of mass we can see through our telescopes is not enough to keep galaxies from spinning apart. The existence of great quantities of hidden mass…
February 27, 2011
The day has finally come. In our very first post, back in June, we wrote that the launch of the new website was slated for later in the summer. In fact, by then we had already been at it for months, and if we had known how much longer it was going to take, we might have thrown up our collective…
February 21, 2011
Some of the best moments in my job as a Weizmann science writer are the times when a scientist I'm interviewing slips in a finding that shifts my understanding of how the world works. Not long ago, for instance, I was speaking with a researcher about his work on phytoplankton. Now, the fact that…
February 7, 2011
Three news items were posted on our site today. The first is on two papers by a group in Spain. Normally we don't publicize papers that are not written by Institute scientists, but these are a special case. They appear to have clinched the claims of a Weizmann scientist that one can treat stroke…
January 25, 2011
Two recent papers to come out of the Weizmann Institute have possible medical applications -- one in preventing pregnancy, the other in preventing the deadly effects of nerve gas.
The first might give pause to those among us who are "believers" in antioxidants. It seems that those "nasty"…
December 28, 2010
This week, two press releases from the Institute:
The first was on the sequencing of the woodland strawberry genome (unfortunately, in the same week the cacao genome was sequenced). The Institute scientists who participated in the project contributed in the computational analysis of genes encoding…
December 20, 2010
Today's guest blogger is Prof. Dan Yakir. Until recently, Yakir was head of the Environmental Sciences and Energy Research Department at the Institute, and he heads the Yatir Forest research station, which monitors, among other things, carbon exchange in a man-made semi-arid pine forest.
This…
December 6, 2010
December's calendar photograph is a battery of five solar cells that also stores electricity in series. The cells were invented and developed at the Weizmann Institute in the late 1970s. These not only converted sunlight into electricity, but also could store some of that energy using a battery-…
November 23, 2010
Here's another article we came across while editing material on the still-theoretical new website. Unfortunately, the article is more about the photographer than Anna Weizmann, herself.
Prof. Anna Weizmann was Chaim's younger sister, (there were a dozen brothers and sisters, all of them chemists…
November 4, 2010
We are still frustrated in our efforts to get our new website up and running, so here's something dated to contemplate. Going through the old articles that are in the process of being transferred over, here's one that popped up from the second issue of Interface magazine (1992): Library without…
October 10, 2010
We don't mean to kvetch, but the new website we promised back in June is still as elusive as cold fusion. Scientific research, of course, is going strong, and we even continue to write about it, but no one can read about it on our website (and therefore, we can't offer links to articles on the…
October 4, 2010
Feel the need to eat chocolate when under pressure? You might be able to blame it on your genes, specifically a gene in the brain that responds to stress. This gene, when active, brings out your anxiety and as well as bringing about metabolic changes that tell your body to burn sugar, rather than…
September 20, 2010
Thousands came to the Weizmann Institute yesterday evening for Researchers' Night activities. Researcher's Night is sponsored by the EU, and it takes place all over Israel and across Europe. In addition to lab tours and showings of 3-D films of molecular structures, the Clore Garden Science -- an…
September 12, 2010
The Jewish holiday season is upon us, and that means lots of days off and not many new science articles. In fact, we have a stockpile of science stories waiting for our new website, but glitches and the need for a Hebrew site have been holding things up. In the meantime, here is a video from the…
August 26, 2010
It goes without saying that questions are the basis of scientific research. But all too often, especially in the PR department, we focus on the findings and forget about the process that led to those findings. So it was a refreshing change for us to put out an annual report on the theme of…
August 23, 2010
The Dot Physics game inspired us to put up this photo from the Institute's new calendar,* which features images of (mostly) old scientific equipment.
In case you haven't guessed, it was called a "tamnun" (Hebrew for octopus) or, more formally, a Multi-Counter Gamma-Ray Goniometer. It was developed…
August 15, 2010
When you look over the assortment of sizes, shapes and colors of tomatoes displayed in the market, do you stop to consider the time and effort that went into developing them (more than ten years to create a new commercial cultivar)? But a variety of sweet, pink-skinned tomato that's popular in the…
August 1, 2010
Are quantum physics more intelligible after a beer or two? That might be an illusion, but you wouldn't know it from the enthusiastic crowd who packed a Rehovot restaurant/pub last Thursday evening to hear a talk on the subject given by one of the Weizmann Institute's research students. Even those…
July 26, 2010
Even severely paralyzed people on respirators can do it: They can sniff. That is, they can at least partially control the movement of air through their nostrils. And if they can sniff, they can use this action to write on a computer screen or steer a wheelchair. That's the principle behind a new…