jhalper | March 3, 2015Today'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 a living room. And a bedroom. And a blind pet cat. But that’s a different story), when Noam asked – ever wonder why people shake hands?
– To show you don’t have a saber up your sleeve – I immediately retorted.
– But that seems odd, doesn’t it? After all, we’re not in the Middle…
jhalper | February 26, 2015 Manot Cave cranium
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 poor Yorick – We can only know
Where you lived all those eons ago
Walking, did you take those others in stride;
Human, yet strange, as they strode alongside?
Did your children wander forth,
Searching for a greener North?
Can your skull, a bit of bone,
Tell us where our seeds were sown?
To…
jhalper | February 12, 2015What'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 is an individual Islet of Langerhans, as you’ve never seen it before. The white dots are the insulin-containing vesicles inside the beta cells, which both sense glucose levels and secrete insulin. Shilo and his team managed to get “close-up shots” of the individual cell…
jhalper | January 26, 2015 Prof. Nir Orion
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 children about the world they live in. But they do it in a sterile environment that is disengaged from the real world; and thus many students do not find relevance or personal meaning in the subjects they “learn.”
There are, of…
jhalper | December 24, 2014Getting 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 “priming” that distinguish them from true embryonic stem cells. The second is keeping them in the iPS state – that is, holding back their urge to differentiate – in lab conditions. And then there is the challenge of directing their differentiation in the way that you want…
jhalper | 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 on Nature's website today, Finkelstein et al. report that bats have an internal neural compass that tracks direction in 3D during both surface locomotion and flight.
That’s from Prof. May-Britt Moser in Nature’s “News and Views.”…
jhalper | November 18, 2014Speaking 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 created brief Martian “springs.”
Sources of sulfur: Olympus Mons on Mars and sulfate-reducing bacteria that live in water on Earth (inset)
On the ocean beds, microorganisms “breathe” sulfur: They take in sulfate – an abundant compound of oxidized sulfur, and use it…
jhalper | November 12, 2014Get 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 cigarettes over the course of a week.
Volunteers given the same conditioning while awake did not reduce their nicotine consumption.
Arzi and Sobel had first demonstrated true sleep learning in 2012. This is the same conditioning that Pavlov…
jhalper | October 29, 2014A 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.
Stem cells and their niche
When a stem cell divides, one daughter maintains the stem cell fate while the other produces a differentiated progeny. Stem cells are positioned in a restricted spatial niche that provides signals maintaining them in a proliferative, nondifferentiated state. After division, only the undifferentiated progeny is retained in the niche.…
jhalper | October 21, 2014To 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 messages left and right, day and night, and taking them in through the specialized receptors on their outer membranes. During the daytime, our bodies produce natural “wake-up” hormones, and these apparently, take precedence over other incoming messages, their receptors…
jhalper | September 30, 2014In this weeks’ news, Weizmann Institute scientists and researchers in Australia have invented a sort of tractor beam. In essence, a tractor beam is a wave that propagates outwards but pulls objects toward its point of origin, rather than pushing them out. Like the science fiction versions, such “beams” might be designed in the future to manipulate solid objects in their wake. The waves the researchers created, rather than moving through the interstellar ether, propagate on the surface of water. Instead of latching on to Klingon spaceships, the scientists think the wave-induced surface flows…
jhalper | September 17, 2014Could artificial sweeteners be helping cause the very thing they are supposed to prevent? They may well do so, and you can probably blame your microbiota – those masses of mostly-friendly bacteria that live in your gut. According to a paper by Weizmann Institute scientists that appeared today in Nature, artificial sweeteners not only encourage the wrong kind of bacteria to expand their numbers, they also induce mix-ups in the cross-communication between these bacteria and your body. Those mix-ups can lead to glucose intolerance – the first step toward metabolic syndrome and diabetes. So,…
jhalper | September 2, 2014Here are some more unsung heroes of research: scanners (the human kind). In the 1950s, Donald Glaser invented the bubble chamber – a way to track infinitesimally small quantum particles as they winked in and out of existence. The idea – which may or may not have been tested in beer – was to create a large chamber of liquid under pressure next to a particle accelerator. As the beams hit their target, producing sprays of new types of short-lived particles, these energetic particles would leave tracks of bubbles in the liquid (usually hydrogen). Everything was caught on arrays of special high-…
jhalper | August 10, 2014Once again, there are three new pieces online on our website, each wonderful in its own way. But Haiku just didn’t seem to fit this batch. So, with apologies to the scientists, here are three limericks on the newest Institute research. As before, follow the links to get to our website.
(Incidentally, there is some precedent for limerick writing at the Weizmann Institute. The late Prof. Amikam Aharoni, who also wrote some serious stuff on ferromagnetism, was known for his limericks.)
The Quasar
There once was a baby black hole
That went for a short little stroll
It zigged and it zagged…
jhalper | July 21, 2014Do you know the real price of a piece of beef? Here is a nice, round number to chew on: The environmental cost of beef is ten times that of dairy, eggs or poultry. This means that if you chose to eat a steak over an omelet, (assuming they have equal amounts of protein) the ecological footprint of your meal will go from a size 5 to a size 50.
Drs. Ron Milo, Gidon Eshel, research students Alon Shepon and Tamar Makov realized that even though we might try to make the right choices in our diets, we’re likely to base them on the pronouncements of experts. The problem is that neither we nor they…
jhalper | June 19, 2014Since mental health problems are estimated to affect some 10% of the world’s population, it stands to reason that if you don’t suffer from depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder yourself, you are probably close to someone who does. So you might be pleased to read about a new finding that could eventually lead to a whole new approach to treating this group of common mood disorders.
The finding is that a tiny scrap of RNA – a microRNA that works in the brain – acts as a sort of mood regulator. It works something like the needle in a steam valve. Mice that had high levels of this particular…
jhalper | June 8, 2014 Convective clouds forming over the Amazon in a blanket smoke. Image: Prof. Ilan Koren
Horse latitudes, doldrums, calms of Cancer and Capricorn: These are all synonymous names for the forsaken regions of the oceans that sailors of previous eras cursed because the winds that once pushed their sails die out there for weeks at a time. (One suggested explanation for the name “horse latitudes” is that some had to throw the horses overboard there when the supplies ran out.) On land, these subtropical belts – around 30-35° north and south of the equator – help form the world’s deserts.
These…
jhalper | May 15, 2014At the level of biomolecules, life boils down to two basic principles: sequence and folding. We know, for example, that the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA contains our genetic blueprint, but the way that our DNA is folded and wrapped up in each chromosome helps determine which genes are easily accessible for copying. Proteins – sequences of amino acids – fold into intricate shapes before assuming their duties. So it is no surprise that the third main molecular sequence in the cell – the RNA, made up of single strands of nucleotides – folds as well. Nucleotides are built to pair up – DNA…
jhalper | May 4, 2014Science on Tap, which happened in Tel Aviv last Weds. eve, was as great a success as ever. Ariela Saba, one of our Weizmann writers, attended one of the talks. Here is her report:
Right around now – in some 55 bars all around Tel Aviv and Jaffa – Weizmann Institute scientists are starting their talks. Some of the patrons are in the middle of dinner; others are already sipping after-dinner drinks. Here in The Container at the Jaffa port, Dr. Eran Elinav is just warming up. From where I am sitting, I can see into the kitchen: Plates are making their way out laden with fluffy white bread, butter…
jhalper | April 29, 2014I’ve heard that for some the experience of undergoing an MRI scan is claustrophobic, but I find it oddly comfy and cocoon-like. OK, there are those gear-grinding screeches and thumps interrupting the music in the earphones. And the cumbersome set-up for imaging breasts, along with the usual admonition to keep perfectly still, does not leave me in a position I would choose for a nap. Still, I’m on the verge of dropping off when the whole table starts shaking under me. They had warned me about this before I climbed onto the apparatus, but for a second I’m not sure whether to laugh (without…