International program
jhalper | June 1, 2015A few days ago, the heads of several Israeli academic institutes, including Weizmann Institute of Science President Prof. Daniel Zajfman, met with Israel’s president, Reuben Rivlin to discuss the possible effects of an academic boycott. Afterward, Prof. Zajfman was interviewed on the evening magazine program London and Kirschenbaum.
For Hebrew speakers, here is the interview:
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKWdbQITj28&feature=youtu.be[/embed]
For those who do not understand Hebrew, here are the main points:
It is dangerous to mix politics with scientific research. That is a…
jhalper | February 3, 2014“Billions of dollars are being spent on weapons of mass destruction. A small fraction of that could go so far to engage more Israeli and Arab scientists in collaborative projects in order to create a critical mass that will bring about peace.” The speaker is Dr. Zafra Lerman, President of the Malta Conferences Foundation, which organizes conferences in nonaligned Malta for Israeli, Palestinian and Middle Eastern scientists. These bi-annual conferences, attended by researchers from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, focus such neutral topics as materials science, as well as common interests like water and…
jhalper | June 4, 2013The world – or at least a large swathe of Israel – was their classroom. An unusual international conference for science teaching experts started out at the Clore Garden of Science, on the Weizmann Institute campus. From there the “nomadic” conference made its way down to Eilat at the southern tip of the country, Jerusalem in the east and points in between.
Outdoor Learning Environment conference at the Ramon crater
Participating in the first international Outdoor Learning Environment conference were science education researchers from the US, UK, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Portugal,…
jhalper | June 20, 2012One of our scientists, Dr. Assaf Vardi, is off on a month-long cruise. He is on the Knorr, a research vessel operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, with a team from the Weizmann Institute and another four research teams on a route that will take them from the Azores to Iceland. On the way, they will be sampling the plankton; among other things they want to understand how the molecular processes that take place in these single-celled organisms affect everything from the ocean's food chain to the oxygen in the atmosphere. Rose Eveleth is posting from the ship daily on the…
jhalper | May 14, 2012Sometime 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 yielded the pleasure of that "Aha" moment when the answer became clear. (For more on the neurobiology of the Aha moment, look at our site.)
So it is no surprise (to me at least) that of the hundreds of science education programs offered through the Davidson Institute of Science Education (the…