New Invention
jhalper | December 10, 2012Is anyone old enough to remember the ad in which two people walking down the street while snacking accidently bump into each other and discover peanut butter on a chocolate bar? Well, it turns out that when physics students run into each other on the street, the result is a quasicrystal with topological properties.
The students in question were members of two different labs in two different physics departments who were both out for a stroll on the same street in Tel Aviv – far from Rehovot and the Weizmann Institute. One was experimenting with a new kind of quasicrystalline optical system –…
jhalper | 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-type setup with electrodes in a chemical solution, so that they could provide electricity day and night.
The idea of efficiently storing solar energy has taken more than one twist and turn since then - various forms of artificial photosynthesis, for example. Interestingly enough, one of the latest…
jhalper | July 26, 2010Even 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 device developed by Prof. Noam Sobel, students and electronics engineers in the Weizmann Institute's Neurobiology Department.
After teaching healthy volunteers to play computer games using a "sniff control" in lieu of a mouse or joystick, the Weizmann team entered into collaboration with Dr Nachum…