Technion mourns the passing of Shimon Peres, 9th President of the State of Israel, a dear friend of Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
“Israel is small in area and poor in resources, so we have no choice but to be great visionaries. To be a visionary is not a tangible quality, but visionaries can create a new reality.”
Shimon Peres (1923-2016) believed in the importance of science and technology for the advance of Israel. In recognition of this, he was conferred a Technion Honorary Doctorate in 1985.
Peres was a firm and steadfast advocate of Technion. In 2003, he was present at the groundbreaking ceremony of the Technion Sara and Moshe Zisapel Nano-Electronics Center; he participated in the signing ceremony of the Technion’s cooperation agreement with the École Polytechnique in 2013; and in 2015, he honored the Technion with his presence at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Guangdong Technion-Israel Institute of Technology (GTIIT) in China, where he said: “The establishment of a Technion campus in China is one more proof that Israeli innovation is breaking down geographic borders.”
Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie said today:
“Shimon Peres, the 9th president of the State of Israel, recipient of an honorary doctorate from the Technion and a true friend, passed away this morning. As a visionary, Shimon Peres believed in the power of technology to change human reality. In a letter he sent me in 2013 he wrote that “Technion researchers and scientists, many talented young people among them, contribute to the positioning of Israel as an original and daring global laboratory at the forefront of scientific development worldwide. There is no limit to your breakthrough and innovation. You guarantee the preservation of Israel’s qualitative edge into the future.”
He was a unique person, full of optimism and vision, who believed in the power of science and engineering in advancing humanity towards a better future. He supported the development of research in nanotechnology and laid the cornerstone for the Nanoelctronics Center named after Sarah and Moshe Zisapel at Technion. Nanotechnology Research, which at the time was a new and pioneering field, is today a central field of activity at Technion.
Peres liked visiting the Technion, and was always thrilled by the level of scientific research and technological innovation. A year ago he honored the Technion by participating in the groundbreaking ceremony of Guangdong Technion Israel Institute of Technology (GTIIT) in China – an initiative he claimed to be evidence of Israeli innovation and its ability to cross geographical boundaries.
We lost a dear man today, a true friend and mentor. May he be of blessed memory.”
In 2014, as President of the State of Israel and as a 1994 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Shimon Peres participated in a panel on campus together with Technion’s three Nobel Laureates: Distinguished Profs. Dan Shechtman, Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover. “How lucky that the Technion was founded 24 years before 1948, thus laying the foundations for the future state of Israel,” said Peres. “Had Israel been founded before Technion, the road would have been much harder. There is hardly an important project in the country that didn’t begin at Technion: the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering trained the people who then established the Aerospace Industries; the Dimona reactor, too, was built by Technion people. I’m proud of the Technion – the institution that produced Israel’s first Nobel Prize Laureates in science.”
Later at the same occasion he related:
“David Ben Gurion, a great dreamer, once asked me to set up a football team that would win the world championship. I told him it was impossible, but to you I say that the Technion can be a world champion among all institutes of its kind. We must dare to dream, because Israel is small in area and poor in resources, so we have no choice but to be great visionaries. To be a visionary is not a tangible quality, but visionaries can create a new reality.”
Technion mourns the passing of Shimon Peres, 9th President of the State of Israel, a dear friend of Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
“Israel is small in area and poor in resources, so we have no choice but to be great visionaries. To be a visionary is not a tangible quality, but visionaries can create a new reality.”
Shimon Peres (1923-2016) believed in the importance of science and technology for the advance of Israel. In recognition of this, he was conferred a Technion Honorary Doctorate in 1985.
Peres was a firm and steadfast advocate of Technion. In 2003, he was present at the groundbreaking ceremony of the Technion Sara and Moshe Zisapel Nano-Electronics Center; he participated in the signing ceremony of the Technion’s cooperation agreement with the École Polytechnique in 2013; and in 2015, he honored the Technion with his presence at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Guangdong Technion-Israel Institute of Technology (GTIIT) in China, where he said: “The establishment of a Technion campus in China is one more proof that Israeli innovation is breaking down geographic borders.”
Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie said today:
“Shimon Peres, the 9th president of the State of Israel, recipient of an honorary doctorate from the Technion and a true friend, passed away this morning. As a visionary, Shimon Peres believed in the power of technology to change human reality. In a letter he sent me in 2013 he wrote that “Technion researchers and scientists, many talented young people among them, contribute to the positioning of Israel as an original and daring global laboratory at the forefront of scientific development worldwide. There is no limit to your breakthrough and innovation. You guarantee the preservation of Israel’s qualitative edge into the future.”
He was a unique person, full of optimism and vision, who believed in the power of science and engineering in advancing humanity towards a better future. He supported the development of research in nanotechnology and laid the cornerstone for the Nanoelctronics Center named after Sarah and Moshe Zisapel at Technion. Nanotechnology Research, which at the time was a new and pioneering field, is today a central field of activity at Technion.
Peres liked visiting the Technion, and was always thrilled by the level of scientific research and technological innovation. A year ago he honored the Technion by participating in the groundbreaking ceremony of Guangdong Technion Israel Institute of Technology (GTIIT) in China – an initiative he claimed to be evidence of Israeli innovation and its ability to cross geographical boundaries.
We lost a dear man today, a true friend and mentor. May he be of blessed memory.”
In 2014, as President of the State of Israel and as a 1994 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Shimon Peres participated in a panel on campus together with Technion’s three Nobel Laureates: Distinguished Profs. Dan Shechtman, Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover. “How lucky that the Technion was founded 24 years before 1948, thus laying the foundations for the future state of Israel,” said Peres. “Had Israel been founded before Technion, the road would have been much harder. There is hardly an important project in the country that didn’t begin at Technion: the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering trained the people who then established the Aerospace Industries; the Dimona reactor, too, was built by Technion people. I’m proud of the Technion – the institution that produced Israel’s first Nobel Prize Laureates in science.”
Later at the same occasion he related:
“David Ben Gurion, a great dreamer, once asked me to set up a football team that would win the world championship. I told him it was impossible, but to you I say that the Technion can be a world champion among all institutes of its kind. We must dare to dream, because Israel is small in area and poor in resources, so we have no choice but to be great visionaries. To be a visionary is not a tangible quality, but visionaries can create a new reality.”
We are all familiar with the phenomenon of foam associated with waves at sea. The waves break and insert air into the water, and the bubbles that are formed rise to the surface and create foam. If, however, we observe a stormy lake or a wave pool, we will not see much of a foam – certainly not as much as we see at sea. This difference between seawater and fresh water was reported in the professional literature already in 1929.
Prof. Abraham Marmur
Foam consists of thin films of an aqueous solution surrounding air bubbles. In order for the foam to be stable, there must be a repulsive force between the two opposite sides of the films, otherwise they will become too thin to survive. This repulsive force is based on electrical charges (electrostatic repulsion), and is usually neutralized by the addition of salt. Therefore, it may have been expected that foam will not form in seawater.
Why this is of interest, you may wonder. Well, foam affects not only swimmers and surfers, but also the introduction of air into the water (vital for life at sea), and mainly cloud formation. Clouds consist of small water drops that result from condensation of water vapor in the air. The stable existence of clouds is contingent upon the presence of a small amount of salt in the drops. The salt particles originate from the bursting of the seawater foam bubbles, which releases them into the atmosphere.
This foam puzzle has been studied for decades, mainly in labs that study the physical chemistry of thin liquid films, and in bubble columns used in chemical engineering. Recently this longstanding mystery has been solved at Technion, as part of Yael Katsir’s doctoral work, under the guidance of Prof. Abraham Marmur from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering. A simple experimental model developed by the researchers, along with a theoretical model explaining the results, enabled the tracking of a single bubble formed below the surface of a salt solution and its rate of coalescence with the surface. To their surprise, the results of the experiment were completely different from the results of bubble column experiments. This contradiction eventually led to the solution. Contrary to the initial assumption that salt neutralizes the electrostatic repulsion, it turns out that in the present case some salt types actually create the repulsion and therefore the foam remains stable over time. The Technion researchers have demonstrated that the necessary conditions for this are high density of bubbles and relatively rapid movement toward each other.
But, how do we know that what happens in a bubble column is the same as in se Waves? Another simple experimental system which simulates ocean waves breaking, consisted of an inclined syringe with a needle, from which a salt solution was jetted into a bath containing the same solution. High-speed photography of the process, done with the help of Gal Goldstein, enabled the researchers to monitor the development of the phenomena in space (on the vertical axis) and in time (on the horizontal axis). The attached photos clearly show the difference between the behavior of bubbles in salt water and fresh water: on the right, in salt water, high density of small bubbles and thick foam over the solution; on the left, in fresh water, much larger bubbles and sparse foam. These experimental results show that the data accumulated over the years with bubble column is indeed relevant to the formation of foam that occurs at sea.
Interdisciplinary discovery at Technion: a cell that uses sunlight to produce electricity and hydrogen from spinach leaf extract
Using a simple membrane extract from spinach leaves, researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed a bio-photo-electro-chemical (BPEC) cell that produces electricity and hydrogen from water using sunlight. The raw material of the device is water, and its products are electric current, hydrogen and oxygen. The findings were published in the August 23 online issue of Nature Communications.
The unique combination of a man-made BPEC cell and plant membranes, which absorb sunlight and convert it into a flow of electrons highly efficiently, paves the way for the development of new technologies for the creation of clean fuels from renewable sources: water and solar energy.
The BPEC cell developed by the researchers is based on the naturally occurring process of photosynthesis in plants, in which light drives electrons that produce storable chemical energetic molecules, that are the fuels of all cells in the animal and plant worlds.
In order to utilize photosynthesis for producing electric current, the researchers added an iron-based compound to the solution. This compound mediates the transfer of electrons from the biological membranes to the electrical circuit, enabling the creation of an electric current in the cell.
The electrical current can also be channeled to form hydrogen gas through the addition of electric power from a small photovoltaic cell that absorbs the excess light. This makes possible the conversion of solar energy into chemical energy that is stored as hydrogen gas formed inside the BPEC cell. This energy can be converted when necessary into heat and electricity by burning the hydrogen, in the same way hydrocarbon fuels are used.
However, unlike the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels – which emit greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere and pollute the environment – the product of hydrogen combustion is clean water. Therefore, this is a closed cycle that begins with water and ends with water, allowing the conversion and storage of solar energy in hydrogen gas, which could be a clean and sustainable substitute for hydrocarbon fuel.
The study was conducted by doctoral students Roy I. Pinhassi, Dan Kallmann and Gadiel Saper, under the guidance of Prof. Noam Adir of the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry, Prof. Gadi Schuster of the Faculty of Biology and Prof. Avner Rothschild of the Faculty of Material Science and Engineering.
“The study is unique in that it combines leading experts from three different faculties, namely three disciplines: biology, chemistry and materials engineering,” said Prof. Rothschild. “The combination of natural (leaves) and artificial (photovoltaic cell and electronic components), and the need to make these components communicate with each other, are complex engineering challenges that required us to join forces.”
The study was conducted at the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP) and carried out at the Technion’s Hydrogen Lab, which was established under the auspices of the Adelis Foundation and GTEP. It was funded by the I-CORE (Israeli Centers of Research Excellence) program of the Council for Higher Education’s Planning and Budgeting Committee, the National Science Foundation (Grant No. 152/11), a special grant from the United States – Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), and the German-Israeli Project Cooperation Program (DIP).
A Cinematic Approach to Drug Resistance Scientists film bacteria’s maneuvers as they become impervious to drugs
At a glance:
Scientists at Harvard Medical School and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have built a giant Petri dish to help visualize how bacteria move as they become immune to drugs.
The device represents a new, more realistic, platform to study bacterial behavior and evolution than traditional lab dishes.
The Hollywood-inspired approach is a powerful teaching tool that visually captures otherwise-abstract concepts, such as mutation and evolution.
The experiments, described in the Sept. 9 issue of Science, are thought to provide the first large-scale glimpse at the maneuvers of bacteria as they encounter increasingly higher doses of antibiotics and adapt to survive—and thrive—in them.
To do so, the team constructed a two-by-four-foot petri dish and filled it with 14 liters of agar, a seaweed-derived jelly-like substance commonly used in labs to nourish organisms as they grow.
To observe how the bacterium Escherichia coli adapts to increasingly higher doses of antibiotic, researchers divided the dish into sections saturated with increasingly higher doses of antibiotic. The outermost rims of the dish were free of any drug. The next section contained a small amount of antibiotic—just about the minimum amount needed to kill the bacteria—and each subsequent section represented a 10-fold increase in dose, with the center of the dish containing 1,000 times as much antibiotic as the area with the lowest dose.
Technion Prof. Roy Kishony
Over two weeks, a camera mounted on the ceiling above the dish took periodic snapshots that the researchers spliced into a time-lapsed montage. The result? A powerful, unvarnished visualization of bacterial movement, death and survival; evolution at work, visible to the naked eye.
The device, dubbed the Microbial Evolution and Growth Arena (MEGA) plate, represents a simple, and more realistic, platform to explore the interplay between space and evolutionary challenges that force organisms to change and adapt or die, the researchers said.
“We know quite a bit about the internal defense mechanisms bacteria use to evade antibiotics but we don’t really know much about their physical movements across space as they adapt to survive in different environments,” said study first author Michael Baym, a research fellow in systems biology at HMS.
The researchers caution their giant Petri dish is not intended to perfectly mirror how bacteria adapt and thrive in the real world and in hospital settings, but it does mimic more closely the real-world environments bacteria encounter than traditional lab cultures. This is because, the researchers say, in bacterial evolution, space, size and geography matter. Moving across environments with varying antibiotic strengths poses a different challenge for organisms than they face in traditional lab experiments that involve tiny plates with homogenously mixed doses of drugs.
A Cinematic Inspiration
The invention was borne out of pedagogical necessity—to teach evolution in a visually captivating way to students in a graduate course at HMS. The researchers adapted an idea from – of all places – Hollywood. Senior study investigator Roy Kishony, who led the research while at HMS and is now at the Israel Institute of Technology, had seen a digital billboard advertising the 2011 film “Contagion,” a grim narrative about a deadly viral pandemic. The marketing tool was built using a giant lab dish to show hordes of painted, glowing microbes crept slowly across dark backdrop to spell out the title of the movie. “This project was fun and joyful throughout,” Kishony said. “Seeing bacteria spread for the first time was a thrill. Our MEGA-plate takes complex and often obscure concepts in evolution, such as mutations-selection, lineages, parallel evolution and clonal interference, and provides a visual seeing-is-believing demonstration of these otherwise vague ideas,” Kishony said. “It’s also a powerful illustration of how easy it is for bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. Co-investigator Tami Lieberman says the images spark the curiosity of lay and professional viewers alike.
“This is a stunning demonstration of how quickly microbes evolve,” said Lieberman, who was a graduate student at the Kishony lab at the time and is now a postdoctoral research fellow at MIT. “When shown the video, evolutionary biologists immediately recognize concepts they’ve thought about in the abstract, while non-specialists immediately begin to ask really good questions.” Bacteria On the Move
Beyond providing a telegenic way to show evolution, the device yielded some key insights about the behavior of bacteria exposed to increasing doses of a drug. Some of them are:
Bacteria spread until they reached a concentration (antibiotic dose) in which they could no longer grow.
At each concentration level, a small group of bacteria adapted and survived. Such resistance occurred through the successive accumulation of genetic changes. As drug-resistant mutants arose, their descendants migrated to areas of higher antibiotic concentration. Multiple lineages of mutants competed for the same space. The winning strains progressed to the area with higher drug dose, until they reached a drug concentration at which they cannot survive.
Progressing sequentially through increasingly higher doses of antibiotic, low-resistance mutants gave rise to moderately resistant mutants, which eventually spawned highly resistant strains able to fend off the highest doses of antibiotic.
Ultimately, in a dramatic demonstration of acquired drug resistance, bacteria spread to the highest drug concentration. In the span of 10 days, bacteria produced mutant strains capable of surviving a dose of the antibiotic trimethoprim 1,000 times higher than the one that killed their progenitors. When researchers used another antibiotic—ciprofloxacin—bacteria developed 100,000-fold resistance to the initial dose.
Initial mutations led to slower growth—a finding that suggests bacteria adapting to the antibiotic aren’t able to grow at optimal speed while developing mutations. Once fully resistant, such bacteria regained normal growth rates.
The fittest, most resistant mutants were not always the fastest. The fittest mutants stayed behind weaker strains that braved the frontlines of higher antibiotic doses.
The classic assumption has been that mutants that survive the highest concentration are the most resistant, but the team’s observations suggest otherwise.
“What we saw suggests that evolution is not always led by the most resistant mutants,” Baym said. “Sometimes it favors the first to get there. The strongest mutants are, in fact, often moving behind more vulnerable strains. Who gets there first may be predicated on proximity rather than mutation strength.”
Co-investigators included Eric Kelsic, Remy Chait, Rotem Gross and Idan Yelin.
The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under grant R01-GM081617 and by the European Research Council FP7 ERC Grant 281891.
Harvard Medical School (http://hms.harvard.edu) has more than 9,500 full-time faculty working in 10 academic departments located at the School’s Boston campus or in hospital-based clinical departments at 15 Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals and research institutes: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, Hebrew SeniorLife, Joslin Diabetes Center, Judge Baker Children’s Center, Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Schepens Eye Research Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, McLean Hospital, Mount Auburn Hospital, Spaulding Rehabilitation Network and VA Boston Healthcare System.
Technion’s Formula Student Team Finishes in The Top Ten in European Competitions
The team won 8th place out of 42 universities in the Formula competition in the Czech Republic, which took place on a wet course
Technion’s fourth Student Formula team finished twice in the top ten in the Formula Student competitions held this summer in Europe. In the competition in Hungary, the team finished in 9th place (out of 34 universities) and in the Czech Republic in 8th place (out of 42).
Ranking was based on a number of criteria, including business plan presentation, circling the track, a 22 km heat (endurance), driving in figure eights, fuel efficiency and acceleration to a distance of 75 meters.
Technion’s Formula car, which competed in the combustion engine category, achieved especially good results in the acceleration heat, the 22 km heat and driving in figure eights – heats that were held on a wet course in the Czech competition.
According to the team leader, student Evgeny Guy, “In both competitions the car performed as planned with no unusual problems. All in all, this was our most successful season to date, and we received warm compliments not only from the judges but also from other teams.”
This year, the Formula team comprised 40 students from seven different faculties at the Technion, some of them long-time participants and some for the first time.
“We started with an idea and sketches,” says Guy, “and we continued with creative solutions, major challenges, debates and experiments into the night – and slowly we saw the car take shape. The idea led to the design, including designing the tools that we used, and we ultimately reached the training and the competition stages. On the way we learned a lot of things. The main thing we learned is that there are no magic solutions in engineering.”
Guy, who led the project, will step down in favor of graduate studies at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, and will hand over the keys to student David Diskin, also from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering.
