Month: October 2022

New members of the Technion’s management:

Professor Naama Brenner – Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs

A member of the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering, Prof. Brenner completed her Ph.D. in the Technion Faculty of Physics. She is a biophysicist and a member of the Network Biology Research Lab. Her research deals with adaptation and learning in complex biological systems, in particular cells, cell populations, genetic and neural networks, and biological control at various organizational levels.

Prof. Brenner replaces Prof. Shimon Marom, who held the position from October 2019 to September 2022.

Professor Wayne Kaplan – Executive Vice President for External Relations and Resource Development

Prof. Kaplan, a faculty member in the Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering, completed all of his academic degrees at the Technion. He conducted his post-doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany. Prof. Kaplan is a fellow in the American Ceramic Society and the Israel Microscopy Society. He studies the structure, composition, and energy of surfaces between different materials and the development of microstructures of materials.

Prof. Kaplan was the dean of the Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering from 2010 to 2014, and served as the Technion’s executive vice president for Research from 2014 to 2019. He replaces Professor Alon Wolf, who held the position of executive vice president for External Relations and Resource Development from October 2019 to September 2022.

Technion President Prof. Uri Sivan congratulated Profs. Brenner and Kaplan and wished them great success in their new positions. He also thanked the three faculty members finishing their terms in management – Prof. Boaz Golani, who served as vice president and CEO of the Technion, Prof. Marom, and Prof. Wolf – for their leadership and dedication during a very challenging time.

Good luck to everyone!

Planting forests in vast semi-arid areas will not moderate global warming and may even worsen it, according to researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel in a study that contradicts some long-held assumptions.

The researchers attribute their findings partly to the fact that forested areas retain more heat than barren land, which is more reflective of solar radiation.

Based on their extensive study of the climate change mitigation potential of the world’s semi-arid areas over a total of 448 million hectares, the researchers also developed a global-scale smart map that shows how their findings can be applied anywhere at a resolution of up to a few kilometers.

In a paper published today in Science, the researchers presented a study of the potential climatic impact on global warming of large-scale afforestation. Their findings show that while semi-arid areas offer the largest potential for afforestation, even extensive afforestation is not an effective climate change mitigation solution.

These unexpected findings are attributed partly to the often overlooked “albedo effect,” which warms the Earth’s surface, according to the research led by Professor Yohay Carmel and his then-PhD student (now Dr) Shani Rohatyn from the Technion’s Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, along with Professor Dan Yakir and Dr. Eyal Rotenberg from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

“When we began the research, we expected to show that extensive planting of forests in semi-arid areas would significantly slow down climate warming,” said Prof. Carmel. “But our study disproved this accepted hypothesis. It is disappointing indeed. Yet, this is how science works – it discovers the truth regardless of what we want to discover. There is also an important lesson here – planting forests, no matter how extensive, will not save us from climate change. Instead, we should focus on reducing emissions.”

The study shows that even if trees are planted in every possible location, their carbon absorption by year 2100 would offset only about 1% of all carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. This is because areas darkened due to forestation absorb more solar radiation than exposed areas like deserts and glaciers (the so called “albedo effect”). Therefore afforestation, while absorbing large quantities of carbon, also typically increases the heating of the previously exposed surface.

The albedo effect was already known in the context of climate change, but this is the first study to produce a worldwide mapping of the phenomenon and to calculate the site-specific balance between the two contrasting effects of forestation – the cooling effect of carbon sequestration and the warming effect of change in albedo. The resulting maps give not only a global perspective of afforestation’s potential for climate change mitigation, but also inform the intelligent planning of forestry.

Dr. Shani Rohatyn, who built the model, points out that smart afforestation – that is, planting forests only in climatically beneficial places based on the current research – is expected to double the emissions offset by afforestation and to increase it even more significantly at the local and regional levels, as the researchers showed in an accompanying article.

“The climatic consequences of planting forests depend on many factors, including the reflection of local radiation from the ground, precipitation and trees’ ability to fix carbon,” said Prof. Yakir. “The good news of our research lies in the tools we developed that make it possible to predict where afforestation can indeed have a positive effect. We hope planners will take these findings into account and use them for optimal planning of planting trees.”

About half of the world’s afforestation potential is located in semi-arid areas, and large-scale plantings are already underway presently in China, Saudi Arabia, the Sahel in western and north-central Africa, and beyond. These projects are expected to transform about 5 million square kilometers of barren land into forests. The current research shows that without proper planning, these projects are liable to create undesirable climatic results, so it is important to conduct site-specific planning of planting in semi-arid areas.

“Afforestation is a process that has many advantages, including local cooling, prevention of soil erosion and more,” concluded Prof. Carmel. “However, uninformed afforestation may destroy rare species adapted to live in the open desert and thus harm biological diversity and, as mentioned, also harm the greater goal of minimizing climate warming. That is why it is so important to take into account all the considerations before starting the wholesale afforestation of large areas.”

The research was supported by the Technion and the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Stephen and Nancy Grand Water Research Institute at the Technion, Israel’s National Science Foundation, the Minerva Foundation, the Yotam Project, and the Sustainability and Energy Research Initiative (SAERI) at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

To read the full article in Science, click here

A total of 2,026 new students – 48.2% of whom are women – began their studies at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa this past Monday. The continued increase in the percentage of female students on campus in recent years is the result of an ongoing effort by the Technion’s management to encourage female high school pupils to major in STEM subjects and to increase the proportion of outstanding women who apply to study science, engineering, architecture, medicine, and teaching. On Sunday morning, a ceremony in honor of the new students was held to launch the academic year.

Technion President Professor Uri Sivan congratulated the new students and said “Today you are joining one of the leading academic institutions in the world, but first and foremost you are joining a new family – the Technion family. Along with your justified pride at being accepted to the Technion, the real challenge begins now. We expect you not only to graduate successfully and to continue the Technion tradition, but also to excel and to lead. The knowledge you will acquire at the Technion is ultimately intended to serve society and improve the quality of life for humanity on this planet, for your sake and for the sake of future generations. The Technion you are entering today is very different from that of 50 years ago, and even five years ago. Information has become accessible to everyone on a variety of platforms, and the Technion must adapt the ways of teaching to the present in order to give additional meaning to the meeting hours in the classrooms and the various forums. We place great emphasis on the quality of the teaching to provide you with the set of skills that you will need in a dynamic world that is rapidly changing. I wish you great success and a fruitful academic year.”

This year, a total of 9,061 undergraduate students will study at the Technion. The proportion of women among all undergraduate students currently stands at 44.2% – the highest in the Technion’s history since its founding in 1912. The faculties that are most in demand among the new students are those that prepare them for the hi-tech and bio-tech professions, in the tracks of electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and data and information engineering. Among master’s degree students, biomedical engineering is very popular.

 

There are also 4,275 graduate students. Some 2,940 of them are pursuing master’s degrees, 251 of whom study at the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York. Some 1,335 students are pursuing a Ph.D.

     

Dean of Students Professor Ayelet Fishman said when she was studying at the Technion, female students made up just 25% of the student population. “Today, the percentage of new female students stands at 48%, and I am proud to congratulate them, as well as the other 52% who are male. Welcome to the ranks of outstanding students in Israeli academia,” she said. “You are all smart and have high academic qualifications, but in all other parameters, you are different from each other. Such differences and diversity are signs of strength, not weakness. Be open to other opinions, help those who are different from you, use these years to expand your social circle and empower yourself – and in the words of tennis legend Serena Williams, ‘A champion is defined not by their wins, but by how they can recover when they fall.’”

At the opening ceremony, Dean of Undergraduate Studies Professor Hossam Haick said: “since time immemorial, the Technion has seen its students as future leaders who will reach crossroads where important decisions are made. Our graduates are required to make decisions out of economic and social responsibility and out of integrity, professionalism and a sense of commitment to the community and society. You, the students of today, are agents of change for the future, leaders who will be ambassadors of science and technology in society.”

Liby Manash, the chairman of the Technion Student Association, told the new students: “You are excited, and this excitement stems in part from the fact that you have been accepted to the best academic institution in Israel. Be involved, don’t be afraid to fail, use these years not only for academic and professional learning but also to get to know yourself better and, above all, don’t give up meeting with friends, sports, and other activities.”

New at the Technion this academic year:

In the past year, the Technion worked to expand the Department of Humanistic Studies and Arts as part of a process designed to expose its students to humanistic subjects, such as ethics, history, art, and philosophy. This exposure will be part of their scientific-technological education, under the belief that in order to train the cutting edge of the State of Israel’s engineers, doctors, architects, and scientists, the students must be given a broad worldview that will enable them to make professional decisions with a clear social and ethical stance in the future.

An important pillar in the department’s expansion is the opening of the “Artist on Campus” program, which invites artists to the Technion to perform and present their works, lead projects and workshops for the entire Technion family, study, and conduct joint research with researchers and students. The first artists chosen to participate in the program are Dr. Orit Wolf, Nardeen Srouji, and Dr. Elad Schneiderman.

Number of students living in the dorms: Technion remains 1st in Israel

The Technion provides students with a variety of housing options on campus that include some 4,600 beds. This is the highest number among the academic institutions in Israel. In preparation for the opening of the academic year, the new Cypress Towers, the construction of which was recently completed, were inaugurated on the campus. The apartments in the new dormitories were designed in a modular way that allows them to be used as shared apartments or as apartments for young families. The opening of the new dormitories increased the housing options on campus by 390 additional beds.

Preparatory courses for the new students

In anticipation of the opening of the new academic school year, a preparatory mathematics course was held. Around 700 new students participated in the course, which was affectionately dubbed “summer camp” by the participants.

Have a great, successful academic year! Good luck with your studies!

Unprecedented achievements for the Technion – Israel Institite of Technology synthetic biology team at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, held in Paris from October 26 to 28. The students won a gold medal, were ranked first in the Bio-manufacturing and Measurement categories, and ended in the Top 10 overall. The group are engineering special bacteria to produce an industrial substance that deters hair loss, and which can be added to regular shampoos and other haircare products.

This year, the iGEM team from the Technion includes 12 students from across the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering, the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science, the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, and the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. The team recently received a special Impact grant given to only a small number of the teams participating in the global competition, based on their projected benefits to humanity.

Every year, the team chooses an innovative project in the field of synthetic biology, and this year, it involves substances that inhibit hair loss caused by chemotherapy. One of the most common cancer treatments, chemotherapy causes damage to healthy living tissues and oftentimes hair loss, among other severe side effects.

The Technion team set to compete in iGEM is working on proving the feasibility of lab production of Decursin, a hair loss deterrent, and its possible incorporation into preparations including shampoo, cream, and more. Decursin is a major component of Angelica gigas Nakai (AGN) root extract. It has many beneficial properties including the abilities to suppress inflammation, repress cancer, and prevent apoptosis – or programmed cell death, including in hair follicles.

Today, the molecule is produced from a rare seasonal flower grown in Korea, by means of an expensive and inefficient process. The student team is engineering bacteria that will produce Decursin industrially.

The prestigious iGEM competition was founded in 2004 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to give students, mainly undergraduates, a chance to experience scientific and applied research in the world of synthetic biology. Since its inception, the competition has been held in Boston. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was held online for the past two years. Now, it will be held for the first time in Europe at the conference center Paris Expo-Porte de Versailles.

This year, more than 300 teams from around the world will participate in the competition, including three Israeli teams – one from the Technion, one from Tel Aviv University, and one from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The first Israeli iGEM team was established at the Technion in 2012 under the guidance of Professor Roee Amit, a faculty member in the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering. He guides the Technion team to this day.

Over the years, teams from the Technion have won multiple gold medals in the competition. But according to Prof. Amit, “beyond participation and winning, it is important to understand that some of the developments by the Technion teams have already been turned into applied and commercial tracks and have a real impact on the world. One of the most prominent examples is Koracell, which was founded on the basis of the technology developed by our students in preparation for a competition iGEM ​​in 2019. The group developed an innovative technology for the production of honey without bees using a genetically engineered bacterium. This technology allows the honey’s texture and taste to be precisely designed, and it is also a platform for simulating other natural metabolic processes.”

The Koracell team recently launched a crowdfunding campaign that offers unique designed products related to synthetic biology, as well as workshops and lectures by group members in synthetic biology, private lessons for high school pupils, and more.

For the campaign page, click here.

The Technion mourns the loss of our good friend and most generous supporter – Lorry Lokey of Atherton, California, USA.

Lorry was a visionary philanthropist who insisted his donations become game changers. In the Technion, he supported, single handedly, the establishment of the Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering, strongly believing that only the merging of basic scientific discoveries with the ability to apply them technologically – will benefit human kind. The Center, which was launched in 2006 under the directorship of Aaron Ciechanover, the 2004 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, transformed profoundly biomedical research in the Technion and served as an example for other universities in Israel.

Lorry was committed to the State of Israel, and wanted to see her flourishing as a center of knowledge in this area of the world. He strongly believed that the road to achieve this goal traverses the combination of high education and interdisciplinary research. For his generous donation, he became a life member of the Board of Governors of the Technion and the university bestowed upon him an Honorary Doctorate. The entire Technion family extends its heartful condolences to Mr. Lokey’s daughters – Basya Lokey, Miriam Khaka, and Ann Lokey – and to the entire family.

One of the first discoveries of quantum physics is that light is made up of particles called photons. Most of the light beams in everyday life contain a large number of photons, but there are interesting applications based on weak light beams. Quantum communication is based on the transfer of data using single photons, when the information is encoded using a certain property of light (e.g., a photon’s color or spatial shape).

Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects cannot be described as independent states of each of the objects, but only in relation to each other. As soon as a measurement is made on one of the intertwined objects, it is immediately reflected in the other. The upside is huge, as quantum communication can guarantee total immunity to eavesdropping.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the common techniques in producing entangled photon pairs is a process called spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC), a technique based on sending a laser light beam through a non-linear optical crystal. The laser beam has a myriad of photons and occasionally one of the photons will spontaneously decay inside the nonlinear crystal and produce a highly correlated photon pair. To harness the SPDC process for quantum communication applications, one must create conditions that will lead to the formation of those unique photon pairs.

In a paper published recently in Optica, the flagship magazine of the Optical Society, a collaborative team of researchers from the Technion -Israel Institute of Technology and Tel Aviv University present a method  that suggest a new way to create entangled photons, based on computational learning tools (https://doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.451115). Partners include Eyal Rozenberg, a doctoral student in Professor Alex Bronstein’s research group from the Technion, and members of Professor Ady Arie’s group from Tel Aviv University, Aviv Karnieli, Ofir Yesharim, Joshua Foley-Comer, and Dr. Sivan Trajtenberg-Mills, who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project team was joined by an external expert from Google, Dr. Daniel Freedman.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As their first step, the researchers developed a numerical model that makes it possible to accurately predict the statistical index that evaluates the correlations between the two photons created in the SPDC process for a given optical system. In the second step, both the crystal’s structure and the laser’s structure were used as parameters on which learning can be performed and a cost function was defined – a function that represents the distance between the result obtained by running the numerical model and the result the system-designer wants to reach. When the learning process was activated, it produced the properties of the nonlinear crystal and the laser beam that would produce a result as close as possible to the desired quantum state.

“Our work, together with its complementary code (https://github.com/EyalRozenberg1/SPDCinv), can contribute to additional exciting advances and discoveries in other quantum and classical systems. We decided to publish the whole algorithm as an open-source code to make it possible for additional research groups around the world to use the tools we have developed,” concluded Rozenberg.

Researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have developed an automatic system for the design and preparation of stabilizing materials to produce a “nanometric package” – a platform for delivering drugs to cancer tumors in the body. In an article published in the journal Biomaterials, the researchers report that by using the innovative system, they developed the necessary materials to create the platform and even demonstrated, in preclinical experiments, its effectiveness in solid malignant tumors.

The research was conducted in the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering under the leadership of doctoral student Yuval Harris and lab director Dr. Hagit Sason-Bauer working with Yosi Shamay, assistant professor of biomedical engineering for anticancer nanomedicine and nanoinformatics.

Anti-cancer drugs such as chemotherapy and kinase inhibitors are designed to destroy cancer cells, but one of their main problems is that only a small fraction of the medicinal substance reaches its destination – the cancer cells themselves. The rest of the drugs are dispersed in the body, damaging healthy tissues. This results in the well-known side effects of nausea (as a result of damage to the intestinal tissue), hair loss, and more serious repercussions.

The damage to healthy tissues caused by anti-cancer drugs is the background for the development of dedicated “packaging” – nanometric capsules that carry the drug to the target and release it there while preventing its leakage into healthy tissues. About 40 nanomedicine products, including the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against COVID-19, have already been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but the development of such transport capsules is a complicated technological challenge. As such, many research groups are working to improve them.

In their Biomaterials article, the Technion researchers present a breakthrough in this topic – an automated process for developing optimal materials for the preparation of these capsules. The process is used both as a robot-chemist that synthesizes new materials and as a robot-pharmacist that formulates them into nanocapsules containing the anti-cancer drug.

“The technology we developed,” explained Asst. Prof. Shamay, “is based on an interesting phenomenon called aggregation-induced emission (AIE) – light emission based on the aggregation state of the drug. This effect means that in its solid or aggregated form, it emits a lot of light energy, but when it is soluble or stable in a capsule, it emits almost no light. Out of about 40 drugs we tested, we found 10 new drugs in which this effect occurs. They can be used as selection criteria in the automated process.”

The automatic system developed at the Technion makes it possible to know, according to the light energy emitted from the drug, which substance makes the best nanoparticles for that drug. This technique led to the discovery of a new stabilizing material whose properties give it many advantages over the existing materials used to create nanometric capsules for drug delivery.

The researchers discovered that the new material is superior in various aspects to the existing materials including efficiency, safety, the uniformity of the particles that make it up, stability over time, and the number of drugs that can be “wrapped” and stabilized with it. All of these traits make it a super stabilizer suitable for the ever expanding field of treatment using nanoscale capsules.

The new material, named R595, was created in a “green” chemical reaction, meaning a reaction that does not require the use of polluting and toxic organic solvents. It demonstrates a very high efficiency of drug loading (90%), which makes it possible to predict the treatment’s effectiveness. In preclinical trials, the effectiveness of the capsule was demonstrated in the treatment of solid tumors resulting from a mutation common in lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and intestinal cancer.

The research was supported by Israel’s National Science Foundation and the Health Ministry. The researchers thank Victoria Zlobin from the Preclinical Research Authority at the Technion.

For the article in Biomaterials click here

Professor Alain Aspect and Professor Anton Zeilinger, two of the three laureates for the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, received honorary doctorates from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in recent years. Together with Professor John Clauser, Profs. Aspect and Zeilinger were awarded the Nobel Prize for their breakthroughs in quantum mechanics.

Prof. Anton Zeilinger received his honorary degree from the Technion last summer during its Board of Governors meeting. Born in Austria in 1945, he is a professor and head of the Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Vienna, president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and senior scientist at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

He received his honorary doctorate from the Technion in recognition of his seminal contributions to quantum science and technology; in appreciation of his dedication to attracting young people to the field; in tribute to his efforts in envisioning science as a platform to enrich the human spirit; and for uniting the Israeli and European academic communities on the path to scientific achievement.

Born in 1947 in France, Prof. Alain Aspect is a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau (which has since become part of the University of Paris-Saclay). The winner of many awards, he was accepted in 2015 as a foreign member of the Royal Society of Sciences of Great Britain.

Prof. Aspect received his honorary doctorate from the Technion at the Board of Governors meeting in 2011 in tribute to his fundamental contribution and outstanding scientific achievements in the fields of quantum mechanics and optics; in gratitude for his education of generations of students who continue making significant contribution to world changing technologies; in recognition of his outstanding leadership in the scientific  community; and in gratitude for his friendship and support for the Technion and the State of Israel.

Profs. Aspect, Clauser,and Zeilinger presented experimental evidence for the existence of the quantum-entanglement phenomenon. Entanglement is a special relationship between particles. When two or more particles are intertwined, manipulation of one particle will simultaneously affect another particle that is at a great distance from it without physical interaction and without the transfer of information. Albert Einstein once claimed the phenomenon is a “spooky action at a distance.”

It was Prof. Aspect who showed the interweaving is an existing phenomenon. Prof. Zeilinger added to this the unique phenomenon of quantum teleportation – the transfer of a quantum state from a given particle to another particle. Here, too, there are important connections to the Technion. The entanglement phenomenon was first presented by Einstein, Russian-American physics Professor Boris Podolsky, and American-Israeli physics Professor Nathan Rosen, who was one of the founders of the Technion Physics Department. The idea of ​​teleportation was proposed by six scientists, including the late Professor Asher Peres, another one of the founding fathers of the Technion Physics Department.

Prof. Zeilinger’s honorary doctorate video:

Prof. Aspect’s honorary doctorate conferment:

Israeli researchers have developed a new technique for controlling the magnetic properties of materials. The method draws inspiration from mineral growth processes by organisms in nature. The research was led and initiated by Prof. Boaz Pokroy and doctoral student Arad Lang from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Dr. El’ad Caspi and his team of researchers from the Nuclear Research Institute in the Negev, and Dr. Giorgia Confalonieri and Dr. Catherine Dejoie from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France.

Biominerals are structures created in nature by almost all animals for a wide variety of purposes, such as building the bones that support the body or the mollusk shell that protects the mollusk inside. These structures are characterized mostly by excellent mechanical properties, meaning they are relatively hard to break. One of the reasons for this is the fact that within the inorganic structure of the mineral, organic molecules (proteins) are integrated and serve as a sort of “glue” that prevents cracks from propagating within the mineral.

Inspired by this phenomenon, researchers in Prof. Pokroy’s lab grew crystals of the mineral manganese carbonate (MnCO₃) in the presence of amino acids – the building blocks of proteins. It turns out that in this synthetic process, the organic molecules, that is the amino acids, also succeed in incorporating themselves into the crystal structure of the mineral. These molecules push the manganese and carbonate ions away from each other and create distortions in the structure of the host crystal.

The researchers then measured the magnetic properties of the crystals that were created. In the measurement, which was conducted at a very low temperature (2 K, about -270 degrees Celsius), it became clear that the new material – manganese carbonate that contains the amino acids – is characterized by a higher magnetic susceptibility than the original material, making it very easily affected by the activation of an external magnetic field. In addition, as the amount of amino acid in the material increases, the reaction of the material to the field becomes even stronger. It also became clear that the threshold temperature, that is the maximum temperature at which the material behaves magnetically, (also called the “Neel temperature”) dropped as a result of the introduction of the amino acids.

The reason for these changes is the distancing of the atoms from each other inside the crystal. This process causes the weakening of the magnetic interactions within it, so there is a stronger effect of the external field.

For the first time, this article presents the possibility of controlling the magnetic properties of materials by incorporating organic molecules that are not magnetic themselves. This study paves the way for using small, non-toxic molecules to change the magnetic properties of a wide variety of materials used in many fields, including medicine and microelectronics.

For the article in Advanced Materials click here