In the academic world, Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel’s name is already well-known. Now the 33-year-old microbiologist – with a Ph.D. from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and four other postdoctoral degrees under her belt – is also being celebrated for her culinary wizardry. The mother of three (a six-year-old; and two-year-old twins) is the newest winner of the Master Chef televised cooking contest in Israel.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2013 was awarded to three researchers for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” Israelis Arieh Warshel, of the University of Southern California, and Michael Levitt of Stanford University, together with Martin Karplus of the University of Strasbourg in France and Harvard University, share the prestigious honor and the $1.2 million purse.
The Li Ka Shing Foundation (LKSF) has given a $130 million grant to the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology for the establishment of a new academic technological institute in China.
The Technion and Shantou University will join forces to set up the Technion Guangdong Institute of Technology (TGIT) which will focus on the fields of engineering, science and life sciences.
Chinese billionaire Li Ka Shing, chairman of the Hutchison Whampoa corporation, is behind the largest ever donation to the Technion and one of the most generous in the history of Israeli higher education.
The grant money will also strengthen the Technion’s home campus in Haifa, for the benefit of its students and researchers.
You already know about Waze, the wildly successful Israeli app that uses crowd-sourced info to guide you where you need to go in the best possible manner.
Now, researchers from two Israeli universities are part of an international team that put three years of analysis into developing a method that relies on Twitter tweets to collect information regarding transportation problems.
“The ability of social networks to produce information on heavy traffic, road hazards, availability of public transportation, and more, is a valuable tool for decision makers,” said Tsvi Kuflik, head of the information systems department at the University of Haifa and one of the authors of this study.
Plant biologist Shimon Gepstein did not set out to find a revolutionary technology that has been successfully producing drought-resistant rice, wheat, sugar beets, cotton, millet and other food crops in several countries.
He and his staff were tinkering with the “juvenile” plant hormone cytokinin to see if they could grow tobacco with a longer growth period and shelf life. The experiments worked beautifully — and then they neglected to water the genetically engineered plants for a few weeks. Surprisingly, after being re-watered they bounced back to life.
…
The technology is benefiting agriculture everywhere, including in Israel.
To read more about the man behind the #innovation, follow the link above.
The highlights include:
- Four Israeli advances in fighting cancer include discovery of a protein that destroys cancer cells.
- Israel’s Technion scientists have developed a molecule that reduces cholesterol.
- Five youth charities received a major windfall following Google’s takeover of Israel’s Waze.
- A new recycling plant will produce 160,000 tons of fuel per year, from garbage.
- Tel Aviv now has free Wi-Fi for everyone.
- A 1400-year-old Jewish medallion has been discovered next to Jerusalem’s Temple mount.
- After a 40-year gap, an Israeli lung transplant patient can blow the shofar again.
- Last week’s JPost Israel Good News descriptive summary
Israel’s Dr. Kira Radinsky has grabbed headlines again. The 27-year-old is one of 2013′s 35 Young Innovators under 35, as chosen by the MIT Technology Review. Radinsky, who started studying at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology at 15 years old, first snagged the world’s attention with her pioneering data-mining software that can predict disasters of many types, including disease outbreaks, violence and natural catastrophes.
For more follow the link above.
