Author: shelleys

Genetic counseling is a complex medical process that includes an explanation of genetic principles and hereditary diseases, risk calculations, and relevant tests. The knowledge revolution in the field of medical genetics makes these conversations increasingly challenging, both for consultants and patients, who need to digest new, complex, and medically complicated information, and translate it into more concrete steps and decisions with deep personal implications for individuals and families. Informed decisions are based on available information, as well as on a wide range of personal factors, including cultural, moral, and religious perspectives.

Genetic counseling is an important service whose availability becomes more and more limited due to a shortage in professionals, the increasing length of time needed for each session, and restricted access to a genetic counseling service in certain geographic areas. These challenges are even more significant in a multicultural population with diverse educational levels, and a poor understanding of genetics. The recent epidemic has added another layer of difficulties in accessing the service.

Olfat Abuleil-Zoubi and Chen Gafni-Amsalem, both studying for a Ph.D. in the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and working together at the HaEmek Medical Center’s Genetic Institute, have developed an approach to make it easier for consultants and patients to streamline the process.  They examined whether the use of digital tools, such as professional animations they developed on selected topics, affect the outcome of genetic counseling. They compared the effect of these animations to counseling without prior intervention, as is the current practice, as well as to the effect of reading an information booklet on the subject prior to counseling, as a more “traditional” educational tool.

Abuleil-Zoubi and Gafni-Amsalem were supervised by the director of the Institute, Clinical Professor Stavit Shalev from the Faculty of Medicine, and Professor Ayelet Baram-Tsabari from the Faculty of Education in Science and Technology. According to Prof. Shalev, “Genetic testing is a process that affects not only those being tested but also their family members and sometimes the wider community as well. The process can generate many concerns, so the access to information and full understanding of the whole medical picture, is very important.  These are topics that are very diverse and personal, such as deciding whether to marry a partner, whether to endanger a pregnancy with an invasive test, or whether to terminate a pregnancy due to diagnosis of a particular genetic condition. They’re decisions that have far-reaching implications. Effective communication between service providers and recipients is critical to a successful process, at the end of which patients will make an informed personal decision, appropriate for them, based on the knowledge and information they acquired during the consultation.”

The two students selected ten relevant topics within genetic counseling and made an animated video for each one containing information and guidance on the specific content. Altogether they produced 20 videos – each topic in both Hebrew and Arabic. “The need for early preparation for counseling has been made clear to us by the people who come to the Genetics Institute for advice,” said Zoabi. “We all know that knowledge is power, and the knowledge relevant to the important decisions related to pregnancy and birth allows people to make more informed decisions in line with their worldview. Furthermore, it is now clear to us that knowledge may help alleviate the concerns associated with the process.”

The trial involved 1,380 patients, some of whom came in for counseling due to abnormal findings during pregnancy and some on other issues, such as genetic screening tests, advanced age of the mother, conditions of family members, and fertility defects. Gafni-Amsalem explained that “although reading explanatory pamphlets has been found to be effective, the animations have been found to be much more effective, especially among less educated populations with poor understanding on genetics.”

“We expect people to make informed decisions about their health,” said Prof. Baram-Tsabari, “but that moment of receiving surprising news in the genetic counselor’s office is probably not the best time to learn the basic concepts of genetics. Making the relevant science accessible, and only the relevant science, in a clear and non-threatening way at a time convenient for the patient to digest, makes it easier for them to make an informed decision.”

Gafni- Amsalem agreed. “The importance of accessing information digitally is particularly relevant today, after a long pandemic that has made it difficult to hold in-person consultations,” she said. “Using animation as a preparatory stage for genetic counseling has many advantages such as being consistent, accurate and reliable, and can be consumed at a time, place – and pace – comfortable to the user, to ensure optimal user experience. Today, digital tools are part of our daily personal and social behavior and digesting the material on a phone prior to a hospital appointment is very normal for our patients.”

“In the experiment, we showed the patients the videos while they were with us at the Institute of Genetics, but following its success, we began to routinely send the digital files to patients’ phones before genetic counseling,” Prof. Stavit said. “Considering the success of the intervention, we plan to roll-out this approach to all patients as part of the general health service in Israel.”

The videos (in Hebrew) can be viewed here.

 

On January 3, 2022, the Technion held an award ceremony for prizes, research grants and scholarships as part of a project, sponsored by SolarEdge, in memory of the late Guy Sella. A Technion graduate, Guy Sella founded SolarEdge in 2006 together with Lior Handelsman, Meir Adest, Yoav Galin and Amir Fishelov. The company they founded became a world leader in smart energy technology, and particularly for solar-power generation.

Guy Sella passed away in August 2019. The project set up in his memory includes the establishment of PEARL (Power Electronics and Renewable Energy Lab) in the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technion; research prizes, research grants, and graduate student scholarships in the field of energy; a biennial energy hackathon for students; and tours for high-school students to the Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP).

The award ceremony was attended by Technion President Prof. Uri Sivan, SolarEdge CEO Zvi Lando, Guy’s widow, Barbara Sella, and representatives from the Grand Technion Energy Program. “I’m sorry that I did not get to know Guy personally,” said the Technion president “I don’t know what impact the Technion had on him, but he certainly left an impact on so many others. The partnership with SolarEdge is a pillar in the strategy that the Technion has been leading in recent years – a true partnership between industry and academia and the removal of boundaries between basic and applied research. Over the next decade, these boundaries will blur even further, and we will realize new breakthroughs and achieve new goals together.”

“Guy wanted to make the world a better place,” SolarEdge’s CEO said. “Our mission is to turn Israel into a sustainable energy powerhouse, and with cooperation between academia and industry, we will continue to push the limits and achieve research goals.”

The ceremony was hosted by the director of the Grand Technion Energy Program, Prof. Yoed Tsur from the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering, who said: “Since its establishment in 2007, the Grand Technion Energy Program has been active in creating research infrastructure and promoting research in this field. GTEP-led activities have generated significant scientific discoveries and major national initiatives and have forged strong industrial and academic collaborations within Israel and with prominent international institutes. We and SolarEdge share a common goal; each of us aspires to be part of the global energy revolution and to provide the necessary solutions to leave a slightly better world for future generations.”

The Guy Sella Research Prize was won by two members of the Grand Technion Energy Program: Prof. Gideon Grader from the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering and Prof. Avner Rothschild from the Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering. They received the award for developing innovative technology to produce hydrogen – the technological basis upon which the start-up company H2Pro was established.

The research grant was awarded to Prof. Yair Ein-Eli from the Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering, and Dr. Nadav Amdursky from the Shulich Faculty of Chemistry.

The Guy Sella Scholarships were awarded to Shalom David Aksman Kleingesinds from the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Amir Marzouq from the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Aviad Navon from the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Natalie Levyfrom the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, and Daniel Gino from the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning.

2022 has begun, and the campus is buzzing with research and student activities — from harvesting seaweed energy, to automating warehouses using robotics, all the way to removing ‘forever chemicals’ from drinking water and improving healthcare through innovative technologies. As our Fall semester is coming to a close, it’s also a wonderful opportunity to salute our seven women deans and nine new female faculty members.

Read all about it in the January edition of ‘Technion LIVE.’

To get the latest news, check out the January edition of our e-newsletter, Technion LIVE.

To read previous issues of Technion LIVE, click here. To subscribe, click here.

The grants are being awarded to the following faculty members:

Dr. Ayala Shiber of the Faculty of Biology is exploring how RNA molecules in the cell direct proteins to fold to their native, functional state and avoid misfolding. She was awarded the ERC grant for her research on cellular mechanisms that protect proteins during synthesis and prevent neurodegeneration and aging.

 

Dr. Shay Moran of the Faculty of Mathematics is researching mathematical problems that arise in computer science, with a focus on combinatorial-geometric problems related to machine learning. He received the ERC grant to conduct research on modern challenges in the theory of generalization.

 

Dr. Aviv Tamar of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering is developing methods to teach robots to autonomously carry out tasks. He received the grant to research deep Bayesian reinforcement learning.

 

Dr. Ron Rothblum of the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science specializes in theoretical computer science, especially in the context of cryptography and complexity theory. He was awarded the grant to develop fast proofs for verifying computations.

“This is an impressive achievement by any measure, especially since the number of applications rose by 25% in 2021,” said Prof. Koby Rubinstein, Executive Vice President for Research at the Technion. “Three of the winning research projects are connected to artificial intelligence (AI), a fact that matches the Technion’s extensive and in-depth activities in this field. The Technion’s efforts to advance the field of AI in Israel have positioned it in first place in this area in Europe, and today the Technion is ranked at the top of European AI research and development.”

The European Research Council was founded in 2007 to support all fields of research and to encourage the best researchers from anywhere in the world. ERC grants are awarded in different categories, one of which is the ERC Starting Grant – a grant intended for young faculty members. Each winning project receives at least 1.5 million euros in support, to be used for advancing the project during a five-year budgetary period.

PFAS are a family of problematic pollutants also known as “forever chemicals” because of their chemical stability and environmental persistence. These substances can be found in a large range of products, including Teflon pan coating, fire-fighting foam, flame retardants, and water repellent additives. They reach the groundwater in various ways, including agricultural irrigation using treated wastewater and fire-fighting substances seeping into the soil. As a result of their chemical stability, they remain intact in the ground for a long time, leading to extensive contamination of drinking sources, which in turn significantly increases human exposure.

International studies have demonstrated the many health risks posed by exposure to PFAS, including cancer, heart and liver disease, fertility problems, birth defects, and damage to the immune system. Consequently, Israel has begun monitoring these substances. In fact, last summer the extraction of potable water in the Krayiot region was stopped following the discovery of a high concentration of PFAS.

Today, removing these substances from drinking water is accomplished through relatively simple and inexpensive adsorption techniques. However, these methods are not sufficiently efficient, and, most importantly, they only transfer the pollutants from the water to the adsorbent material – which requires additional purification steps to get rid of the toxic adsorbed substances. Furthermore, these methods are not selective: they can also remove substances that are essential for people’s health.

There are two new and promising solutions: using oxidation processes and using targeted polymers that efficiently adsorb the polluting substances. Yet, until now these technologies have not exhibited satisfactory results.

The new research examined the possibility of combining these two methods – separating the pollutants with special polymers, and then using advanced oxidation processes to eliminate them. The findings indicate that proper planning leads to high efficiency under a wide range of acidity (pH) and salinity. The method depicted in the article shows the removal of seven types of PFAS – even when all of them are found in the same unit of fluid – at a level of efficiency that approaches 90%, and it does so within a few minutes.

The system described in the article is based on natural materials that are both safe and inexpensive. The researchers used ubiquitous soil minerals – iron oxides and clays, together with cyclodextrin polymers. The clay-iron-polymer composites act as accelerators that confine the PFAS on the surface and then accelerate the oxidation process that destroys the pollutants into non-toxic substances (fluoride ions, water, and carbon dioxide). This combination efficiently removes the PFAS and does not release unwanted substances in water used for drinking.

In their article, the researchers show that this system makes it unnecessary to carry out complementary processes such as heating, UV radiation, and using sound waves, which make the task more complicated and more expensive.

The research was conducted in the Soil Chemistry Laboratory in the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The researchers wish to thank the Lady Davis Foundation for Samapti Kundu’s postdoctoral research grant.

Click here for the paper in Chemical Engineering Journal.

 

Researchers from Maccabi KSM Research and Innovation Center, in collaboration with researchers from the Technion, found that the effect of the COVID-19 booster shot on lowering the viral load is waning, similar to the second dose of the vaccine

A new study by Maccabi KSM Research and Innovation Center (Kahn-Sagol-Maccabi), headed by Dr. Tal Patalon, and the Technion, shows that the effectiveness of the coronavirus booster vaccine in lowering the viral load, is similar to the second vaccine dose – reducing the viral load within months. Previous studies have found that the viral load is most likely related to the chances of infecting others, so the lower the viral load, the lower the chances of infection.

According to Dr. Tal Patalon, Head of Maccabi Research and Innovation Center: “In light of the spread of the Omicron variant, it is highly recommended that at-risk populations follow the recommendations of the Ministry of Health. We researchers, along with healthcare policy representatives, have to continue monitoring the spread of the virus; its short- and long-term implications, and to manage this global epidemic wisely.”

“The results suggest a significant decrease in the effectiveness of the vaccine against the transmission of the virus, and this decline may be affecting the spread of the virus in the community”

According to Prof. Roy Kishony from the Technion’s Faculty of Biology: “In previous studies, we have seen that the vaccine and the booster not only reduce the chances of getting the disease but also reduce the viral load in the body of those who are infected, thus apparently reducing further infections in the population. However, during our current work, we have seen that the protection of the vaccine against a high viral load decreases within a few months after the booster, similar to the decline we saw after the second dose. These results suggest a significant decrease in the effectiveness of the vaccine against the transmission of the virus, and this decline may be affecting the spread of the virus in the community.”

This is the sixth study on coronavirus as part of collaborative work between the researchers. The study was led by Dr. Tal Patalon and Dr. Sivan Gazit from the Maccabi Research and Innovation center together with Prof. Kishony, Matan Levine-Tiefenbrun and Dr. Idan Yelin from the Technion Faculty of Biology and the Lorry I. Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering.

The study was carried out on anonymized data with the approval of the IRB Committee and included over 21,000 positive tests from Maccabi members over the age of 20. The period studied was between June 28 and November 29, 2021 – five months during which Delta was the dominant strain in Israel, prior to the onset of Omicron.

The researchers note that the study has some limitations. Firstly, the study refers solely to the effect of the booster on the viral load and does not examine the efficacy in preventing the disease; that is, it does not determine if the protection against infection is similarly waning. Secondly, although viral load is a common indication of the presence of the virus, the correlation between the viral load and infection is not fully established. Thirdly, differences in public behavior may affect the timing in which people are tested, and since viral load is associated with the time after infection, such differences may skew the results of the study.

The researchers plan to continue tracking real world data and conducting followup studies in different populations.

The MindState ideation competition, which harnesses scientific and technological knowledge for improving healthcare, will take place online on January 11-12. Approximately 70 students from the Technion and Cornell Tech will participate in the ideation sprint, working in mixed groups of students from both institutions with support from medical teams and leading designers. The winners will receive monetary prizes – $5,000 for 1^st place, $3,000 for 2^nd place and $2,000 for 3^rd place.

During the event, student teams tackle challenges of developing innovative technologies that have business potential and can improve the future of medicine. In past years, the winning teams proposed unique and innovative solutions for a wide range of medical problems. Last year, the team that won 1^st place later received the top prize in the BizTEC entrepreneurship competition: https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2021/02/time-to-care/.

The annual ideation event is organized by the Technion, Cornell Tech, the MindState company and two leading hospitals, Rambam and Sourasky. The competition presents real challenges and real problems, and some of the solutions developed by the students during the ideation become actual inventions and sometimes grow into start-up companies.

Senior doctors have been extremely helpful in formulating the challenges: Prof. Lior Gepstein of the Technion Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, director of the Rambam Department of Cardiology and director of the Research Division; Dr. Yona Weissbuch, director of the National Center for Medical Innovation Studies in partnership with Rambam and the Technion; and Prof. Eli Sprecher, deputy director of Research & Development and director of the Department of Dermatology at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov).

This is the hackathon’s third year, and this year 35 students from seven different Technion faculties will participate – compared to only six students who took part in the first year, 2020.

This year, the event will focus on the connection between climate and medicine, with a special emphasis on challenges in three categories: Planet Earth, hospitals, and patients. The teams will confront a range of subjects, such as air pollution and respiratory disease, early detection of skin cancer, preparedness for natural disasters, improving hospital processes, ‘green’ hospitals, reducing the psychological impact of isolation, and dealing with fatigue of medical teams due to lack of sleep.

The competition is the conclusion of a unique class offered at the Technion by Dr. Joachim Behar, director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Laboratory (AIMLab­) in the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, and teaching assistant Sophie Segal. Together with Dr. Behar, the ideation sprint is led by Prof. Ron Brachman, Director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute; Prof. Ariel Orda, Jacobs Program head at Technion; Michael Escosia, Libby Budashev and Lucie Milanez of the Jacobs Institute; and Tamar Many and Henk van Assen, founders of MindState. According to Many, “the previous ideation sprints clarified the importance of the direct connection between the multidisciplinary students, the designers and the medical teams who cope with real problems. The enthusiasm can be seen from all sides, and I am delighted that the medical teams and the hospital management are fully committed to our initiative in such difficult times.”

The student teams are accompanied by mentors from the Rambam and Sourasky medical centers and by professional designers from the leading companies Designit, Monday, Google, Melio, Wix and Lightricks. The concluding ceremony, during which the winners will be announced, will take place in April.

The joy of a baby coming into the world is accompanied by fear for this helpless little being, completely reliant on outside help to survive. This trepidation is even greater for a baby born preterm, much more unprepared for the world that welcomes it, and needing help even to breathe. In the womb, the fetus receives oxygen from the mother, through the umbilical cord. Once born, the newborn must breathe independently. Many premature babies with underdeveloped lungs require mechanical ventilation. The more prematurely the baby is born, the longer they will need artificial breathing.

Using a 3D model of the babies’ upper airways, the research team of Prof. Josué Sznitman, of the Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, discovered that due to shear forces caused by the air jet from the mechanical ventilator, cells in the airways display stress, and an inflammation process begins. Following this discovery, the researchers successfully tested the use of an anti-inflammatory drug, commonly used to help asthma patients, to prevent the damage caused by the ventilator.

Approximately one in 10 babies around the world is born prematurely. In high-income countries, most premature babies survive. But despite significant advances in the care of preterm babies and improved ventilation technologies, many suffer from lifelong disabilities of varied severity. One problem is offsetting adverse side effects of invasive mechanical ventilation, essential for maintaining the lives of preemies incapable of breathing independently. Today, the impact of ventilation on patient health and the fundamental mechanisms causing damage is still not fully understood, which presents an obstacle to developing solutions. Prof. Sznitman’s team confronts these challenges by combining expertise in physics, physiology, and biology.

In a study published last year in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Prof. Sznitman and (his then doctoral student) Dr. Eliram Nof identified an airflow phenomenon largely unnoticed in medical literature: a jet structure originating in the tube inserted into the trachea during mechanical ventilation. Using a physical (fluid dynamics based) model, they discovered regions of elevated shear stress, potentially incurring damage to the epithelial cell lining of the respiratory tract. Calculations revealed significant risks of injury from these forces, especially worrisome if occurring for lengthy periods in fragile patients such as premature babies.

In a follow-up study recently published in Bioengineering & Translational Medicine, the researchers tested their hypothesis in a new model featuring an artificial human lung epithelium. The team constructed a 3-D model of the upper respiratory tract, including the trachea and several branched airways. They cultured a layer of human lung epithelial cells in the model’s inner lumen, tracking their condition following mechanical ventilation. They observed that the cells displayed stress and released cytokines – signaling proteins that influence inflammation.

Following this discovery, the group looked for means to mitigate or prevent the damage. The medication Montelukast, sold under the brand name Singulair, is commonly used in treating asthma patients. They found that topical delivery of the medication prior to starting mechanical ventilation considerably reduced cell death. It also altered the secretion of inflammation-related signaling proteins (cytokines). Repurposing an existing, fully approved drug saves the vast resources and time required for developing new medication, allowing for faster and easier adoption in other clinical uses.

“Today, we know that artificial ventilation incurs various types of trauma to the respiratory system despite being an established, life-saving procedure,” explained Prof. Sznitman. “Much of this damage has been attributed to mechanical factors such as high pressure and distention of deep (alveolar) lung tissue. In recent years, new insights into more complex processes have emerged. In the current study, we demonstrated in vitro the start of an inflammatory response at the core of morbidity in invasively ventilated infants. We linked the flow-induced shear stresses to inflammation by measuring cytokines, the messengers of the immune system, and tracking epithelial cell health.”

Damage caused by mechanical ventilation, particularly prolonged mechanical ventilation, is not just observed in premature babies. When the COVID-19 epidemic began, countries were racing to acquire ventilators. Soon, however, patients requiring prolonged respiratory support were developing inflammation and dying. Medical personnel started making every effort to postpone putting patients on ventilators, even when the patients were struggling to breathe on their own. The findings of Prof. Sznitman’s group could improve their survival chances and help patients suffering from other conditions, such as COPD, that necessitate prolonged mechanical ventilation.

The methodology used by Prof. Sznitman’s group is of particular interest. Modeling the upper airways, they uncovered the mechanism of a deleterious effect and proposed treatment, all without necessitating animal studies. While animal testing cannot be eliminated from medical research entirely, advanced technologies permit scientists to use other means for earlier stages. Beyond reducing animal suffering, such methodologies permit scientists to obtain results faster, at a lower cost, and with reduced confounding factors, speeding up research.

This study was led by Prof. Josue Sznitman, Dr. Eliram Nof, and Dr. Arbel Artzy-Schnirman, in collaboration with clinical specialists in pediatrics and otolaryngology, including Dr. Liron Borenstein-Levin, a faculty member at the Technion’s Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and an attending physician at the Neonatology Intensive Care Unit at the Rambam Health Care Campus. The work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

Dr. Eliram Nof recently began his postdoctoral fellowship at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and Dr. Arbel Artzy-Schnirman has been appointed the Head of the Advanced Technology Center for Applied Medical Research at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa.

Particle image velocimetry (PIV)-based visualization of the air jet in the airways:

For the article in Bioengineering & Translational Medicine click here

Today, January 4th, is World Braille Day, marking Louis Braille’s birthday. Although the Braille tactile writing system was invented about 200 years ago, there have been many technological challenges in adapting it to the computerized age.

A recent breakthrough published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) heralds a new generation of compact and efficient Braille monitors. The findings by researchers at the Technion and Cornell University present a “robotic Braille monitor” with a dynamic silicone surface and small Braille “bubbles” on top of it. The development is based on the flow of methane and oxygen into the silicone surface and the swelling of these “bubbles” using controlled micro-scale combustion and without any need for a pump.

The study’s authors, Prof. Amir Gat and Ph.D. student Ofek Peretz from the Technion Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, are engaged in broader research of soft robotics. This area draws great inspiration from biological tissue and natural organs such as an elephant’s trunk and an octopus’ arm, creating articulated robots, using flexible tubes actuated by internal fluids. The flow of the liquid into different patterns affects the flexible device in different ways, and a well-designed system can lead to precise movement and efficient control.

Louis Braille, born January 4, 1809, lost his sight at the age of five. His father created a wooden board for him with nails in the shape of alphabet letters. At the age of 15, Braille developed the code now known as Braille.

For the article in PNAS click here.

The chairman of the conference’s organizing committee is the Director of IDSI, Prof. Paul Feigin from the Technion. “The conference will be attended by dozens of Technion lecturers and their colleagues from research universities in Israel, from public institutions and from companies,” he said. “The importance of a physical meeting lies in the need to build the data science community to include core researchers and researchers from satellite disciplines. Such a community will promote mutual and interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and lead to the informed and ethical use of data science for the benefit of society and industry.”

In recent years, there has been a leap in data science and artificial intelligence, and these are increasingly affecting all areas of life, including transportation, medicine, and education. It was against this backdrop that the national initiative was created in 2020. Established by the Council for Higher Education, the initiative promotes activity in these fields through collaborations within academia, between academia and industry, and between entities abroad. The international conference marks the first year of the program’s activities both nationally and internationally.

The conference deals with a wide range of topics, including computational learning, natural language processing (NLP), statistical learning, bioinformatics, AI and data science in education, computer vision, data science in biology, responsible AI and general welfare, and the mathematical basis for data sciences. The conference’s keynote lecturers are Prof. Yoav Freund and Prof. Trey Ideker from the University of California, San Diego; Prof. Bin Yu from Berkeley, and Prof. Ming Yuan from Columbia University. Alongside the rich professional program, which includes lectures and poster presentations, there will also be social activities, including gala evenings and excursions in and around the Dead Sea and Ein Gedi.

 

Link to the conference website

Link to IDSI website

From the Terminator to Spiderman’s suit, self-repairing robots and devices abound in sci-fi movies. In reality, though, wear and tear reduce the effectiveness of electronic devices until they need to be replaced. What if the cracked screen of your mobile phone could heal itself overnight? Or, if the solar panels providing energy to satellites could self-repair the damage caused by micro-meteorites?

The field of self-repairing materials is rapidly expanding, and what used to be science fiction might soon become reality, thanks to Technion – Israel Institute of Technology scientists who developed eco-friendly nanocrystal semiconductors capable of self-healing. Their findings, recently published in Advanced Functional Materials, describe the process in which a group of materials called double perovskites display self-healing properties after being damaged by the radiation of an electron beam. The perovskites, first discovered in 1839, have recently garnered scientists’ attention due to unique electro-optical characteristics that make them highly efficient in energy conversion, despite inexpensive production. A special effort has been put into the use of lead-based perovskites in highly efficient solar cells.

The Technion research group of Prof. Yehonadav Bekenstein from the Faculty of Materials Sciences and Engineering and the Solid-State Institute at the Technion is searching for green alternatives to the toxic lead and is engineering lead-free perovskites. The team specializes in the synthesis of nano-scale crystals of new materials. By controlling the crystals’ composition, shape, and size, they change the material’s physical properties.

Nanocrystals are the smallest material particles that remain naturally stable. Their size makes certain properties more pronounced and enables research approaches that would be impossible on larger crystals, such as imaging using electron microscopy to see how atoms in the materials move. This was, in fact, the method that enabled the discovery of self-repair in the lead-free perovskites.

The perovskite nanoparticles were produced in Prof. Bekenstein’s lab using a short, simple process that involves heating the material to 100°C for a few minutes. When Ph.D. students Sasha Khalfin and Noam Veber examined the particles using a transmission electron microscope, they discovered the exciting phenomenon. The high-voltage electron beam used by this type of microscope caused faults and holes in the nanocrystals. The researchers were then able to explore how these holes interact with the material surrounding them and how they move and transform within it.

They saw that the holes moved freely within the nanocrystal but avoided its edges. The researchers developed a code that analyzed dozens of videos made using the electron microscope to understand the movement dynamics within the crystal. They found that holes formed on the surface of the nanoparticles, and then moved to energetically stable areas inside. The reason for the holes’ movement inwards was hypothesized to be organic molecules coating the nanocrystals’ surface. Once these organic molecules were removed, the group discovered the crystal spontaneously ejected the holes to the surface and out, returning to its original pristine structure – in other words, the crustal repaired itself.

This discovery is an important step towards understanding the processes that enable perovskite nanoparticles to heal themselves and paves the way to their incorporation in solar panels and other electronic devices.

Prof. Yehonadav Bekenstein completed his degrees in physics and chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the Technion faculty in 2018. He has received multiple awards, including the Käte and Franz Wiener Prize (Excellent PhD Thesis Award), the Rothschild Fellowship for postdoctoral scholars, and the Alon Scholarship for the Integration of Outstanding Faculty. In 2020 he was awarded the ERC Starting Grant for early-career scientists.

For the article in Advanced Functional Materials click here

Electron microscopy video displaying the formation of the hole on the surface of the nanocrystal and its movement inwards:

Electricity from the Sea: Researchers from the Technion have developed a new method that harvests an electrical current directly from seaweed in an environmentally friendly and efficient fashion. The idea, which came to doctoral student Yaniv Shlosberg while he was on the beach, has been developed by a consortium of researchers from three Technion Faculties who are members of the Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP), along with a researcher from the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research Institute (IOLR).

The researchers have presented their new method for collecting an electrical current directly from macroalgae (seaweed) in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics. The paper describes results obtained from researchers from the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry, the Faculty of Biology, the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering, GTEP, and IOLR.

The use of fossil fuels results in the emission of greenhouse gases and other polluting compounds. These have been found to be connected to climate change, as evidenced by a variety of terrestrial phenomenon that have brought climate change to the forefront of global concerns. Pollution due to use of these fuels starts from their extraction and transportation around the globe, to be used in centralized power plants and refineries.

These problematic issues are the driving force behind research into methods of alternative, clean, and renewable energy sources. One of these is the use of living organisms as the source of electrical currents in microbial fuel cells (MFC). Certain bacteria have the ability to transfer electrons to electrochemical cells to produce electrical current. The bacteria need to be constantly fed and some of them are pathogenic.

A similar technology is Bio-PhotoElectrochemical Cells (BPEC). As for the MFC, the source of electrons can be from photosynthetic bacteria, especially cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae).  Cyanobacteria make their own food from carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight, and in most cases they are benign. In fact, there are cyanobacteria such as Spirulina, that are considered “superfoods” and are grown in large quantities. The research groups of Profs. Adir and Schuster have previously developed technologies that utilized cyanobacteria for obtaining electrical current and hydrogen fuel, as published in Nature Communications and Science. Cyanobacteria do have some drawbacks. Cyanobacteria produce less current in the dark, as no photosynthesis is performed. Also, the amount of current obtained is still less than that obtained from solar cell technologies, so that while more environmentally benign, the BPEC is less attractive commercially.

In the present study, the researchers from the Technion and IOLR decided to try to solve this issue using a new photosynthetic source for the current – seaweed (macroalgae).

The research was led by Prof. Noam Adir and the doctoral student Yaniv Shlosberg, from the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry and GTEP. They collaborated with additional researchers from the Technion: Dr. Tunde Toth (Schulich Faculty of Chemistry), Prof. Gadi Schuster, Dr. David Meiri, Nimrod Krupnik and Benjamin Eichenbaum (Faculty of Biology), Dr. Omer Yehezkeli and Matan Meirovich (Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering) and Dr. Alvaro Israel from IOLR in Haifa.

Many different species of seaweed grow naturally on the Mediterranean shore of Israel, especially Ulva (also known as sea lettuce) which is grown in large quantities at IOLR for research purposes.

After developing new methods to connect Ulva and BPEC, currents a thousand times greater than those from cyanobacteria were obtained – currents that are on the level of those obtained from standard solar cells. Prof. Adir notes that these increased currents are due to the high rate of seaweed photosynthesis, and the ability to use the seaweed in their natural seawater as the BPEC electrolyte – the solution that promotes electron transfer in the BPEC. In addition, the seaweed provides current in the dark, about 50% of that obtained in light. The source of the dark current is from respiration – where sugars made by the photosynthetic process are used as an internal source of nutrients. In a fashion similar to the cyanobacterial BOEC, no additional chemicals are needed to obtain the current. The Ulva produce mediating electron transfer molecules that are secreted from the cells and transfer the electrons to the BPEC electrode.

Fossil fuel-based energy producing technologies are known as “carbon positive.” This means that the process releases carbon to the atmosphere during fuel combustion. Solar cell technologies are known as “carbon-neutral,” no carbon is released to the atmosphere. However, the production of solar cells and their transportation to the site of use is many times more “carbon positive”. The new technology presented here is “carbon negative.” The seaweed absorbs carbon from the atmosphere during the day while growing and releasing oxygen. During harvesting of the current during the day, no carbon is released. During the night, the seaweed releases the normal amount of carbon from respiration. In addition, seaweed, especially Ulva, is grown for a variety of industries: food (Ulva is also considered a superfood), cosmeticsת and pharmaceuticals.

“It is a wonder where scientific ideas come from,” says Yaniv Shlosberg, the graduate student who first thought of the possibility of using seaweed. “The famous philosopher Archimedes had a brilliant idea in the bathtub, leading to the “Archimedes’ Principle.” I had the idea one day when I went to the beach. At the time I was studying the cyanobacterial BPEC, when I noticed seaweed on a rock that looked like electrical cords. I said to myself – since they also perform photosynthesis, maybe we can use them to produce current. From this idea came the collaboration from all the Technion and IOLR researchers which led to our most recent paper. I believe that our idea can lead to a real revolution in clean energy production.”

The Technion/IOLR researchers built a prototype device that collects the current directly in the Ulva growth vat. Prof. Adir adds: “By presenting our prototype device, we show that significant current can be harvested from the seaweed. We believe that the technology can be further improved leading to future green energy technologies.”