In peacetime, aside from his research, Professor Aviv Censor has a large following in Israel for his ultra-helpful videos explaining complex math problems for high schoolers.

Since October 7^th, he’s helped Israelis down South navigate the complex logistical and other challenges after the horrific attack.

Likewise active in the Achim LeNeshek (Brothers-in-Arms) organization protesting judicial reform, Aviv took a drastic pivot just 2 days after the attacks on Gaza Envelope kibbutzes.

He took his family and moved in with friends temporarily in Le Havin, 10 minutes north of Beer Sheva, so he could help in the massive Home Front effort.

The local Achim LeNeshek headquarters were quickly converted into a logistical coordination center and Aviv and other volunteers got quickly to work.

The aftermath of the attack, aside from being beyond devastating and totally unprecedented, required a lot of help with even simple things, like armed convoys to evacuate families, bringing medicines and equipment to just-arrived army units, baby food to families who needed it.

There is a strong need to pick vegetables and fruits to prevent them going to waste.

Cows and other domestic animals need to be evacuated or cared for in difficult conditions (army equipment noise, among others).

Vets and cattle ranchers and farm volunteers need transport and other help.

Lots of other non-military needs arise each day.

Just today, he went to sit shiva with various families, to provide comfort to mourners.

The volunteer effort is a truly massive one in the South, just as in the North and Center, a testament to the resilient and helpful spirit of Israel.

The Technion community is immensely proud and supportive of Aviv and our many other volunteers, as well as reservists and soldiers on active duty.

We pray for their safety and for better times very soon.

On the morning of October 7th, Neta Portal and Santiago Perez woke up in their small apartment in Kfar Aza to the sound of warning sirens. They locked themselves in their safe room but were injured by the bullets that penetrated the door. When Santiago realized that the terrorists had thrown a grenade at the safe room door, he pushed Neta out of the window and followed her. While escaping from the apartment, they faced more gunfire from terrorists but managed to evade it and hide under one of the nearby buildings in the kibbutz. Santiago was hit in the back by a bullet, and Neta suffered seven gunshot wounds to her legs.

Both Neta and Santiago survived, injured but hidden, until they were rescued by Neta’s father, Deputy Chief Superintendent Shimon Portal. During her rehabilitation period at the Loewenstein Rehabilitation Center, Neta received a unique orthotic device tailored especially for her. The device will help her to walk while her severely injured ankle is unable to bear weight. The device was developed at the Technion and tailored to Neta based on a three-dimensional scan of her leg. The personalized device was built thanks to a long-standing collaboration between Dr. Dana Solav from the Technion’s Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Dr. Amir Haim from the Loewenstein Rehabilitation Center. Both were doctoral students at the Technion under the guidance of Prof. Alon Wolf, currently dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, and have maintained a fruitful professional relationship ever since.

From left to right: Dr. Dana Solav, Neta Portal and Dr. Amir Haim

According to Dr. Solav, the purpose of the device is to enable the recovery of mobility while practicing natural and symmetrical walking under the requirement that the ankle is entirely or partially offloaded. The device effectively transfers weight to the healthy part of the leg above the injured part, allowing walking without causing pain. Moreover, it features an adjustment mechanism that facilitates a gradual and measured increase of weight-bearing of the affected part, according to the level permitted by the clinical condition.

Dr. Solav added that while walking with the device, the knee and hip joints can move and function normally, which helps prevent muscle atrophy and bone density reduction, especially in long-term rehabilitation processes. The three-dimensional scan eliminates the need for a plaster cast, and the computational design process facilitates the fabrication process, which combines a lightweight aluminum frame and 3D-printed parts.

Dr. Solav stated that in peacetime, injuries like Neta’s are uncommon. Unfortunately, in recent months, she has encountered other cases of soldiers with similar injuries. Sometimes, the injuries lead to amputation, but in many cases, doctors try to save the foot and ankle with complex surgeries, and the orthosis can improve the effectiveness of long-term rehabilitation after surgery. Additionally, they believe the orthosis can assist many diabetes patients who cannot walk due to pressure ulcers on the soles of their feet.

Dr. Solav’s research team, which consists of students and engineers, continues to develop and improve the orthosis while exploring its impact on walking. Simultaneously, the team is planning clinical trials in collaboration with Loewenstein Rehabilitation Center, and hoping to see many people improve their walking rehabilitation by using the innovative orthosis in the near future.

Dr. Dana Solav, a faculty member in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technion, completed her MSc and PhD under the guidance of Prof. Alon Wolf and Prof. Miles Rubin, and returned to the Technion as a faculty member after completing a post-doctorate at MIT. Her laboratory focuses on biomechanical interfaces, developing medical devices that connect to the body, such as prosthetics and braces, using 3D scans, medical imaging, and computer simulations.

Dr. Amir Haim is the director of the Biomechanical Rehabilitation Unit, the chairman of the Research Authority and a senior physician in the Department of Orthopedic Rehabilitation at the Loewenstein Rehabilitation Medical Center. He is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and an outstanding graduate of the combined MD/PhD track at the Technion – a track where participants complete a degree in medicine and a doctorate in philosophy.

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CONTENT

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“No one prepares you for the moment when you will be a refugee in your own country.”

Hila Hatsav, a “Sderot refugee,” as she calls herself, was supposed to enter the Technion dormitories on October 10^th, before beginning her studies in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning.

On October 7^th, following the heavy rocket barrages on Sderot and the infiltration of armed terrorist squads into the city, she hurried to evacuate without having time to pack even a small bag – not even a pillow and a sheet. “No one prepares you,” she says, “for the moment when you become a refugee in your own country.”

On October 10^th Hila received a phone call from Malka Rosenfeld, head of the Technion Student Union (TSA), who told her: Just come, we’ll take care of everything for you. “And really, I came to the guest house at the Technion to an apartment that had been arranged for me. They provided me with clothes, toiletries, food—whatever I was missing. Even a computer that allows me to study these days. And no less important – I met an amazing team here, from a student who volunteered to introduce me to the Technion in the early days to the president of the Technion who met me and asked to hear my story.”

Hila doesn’t know when she’ll be able to return to her home in Sderot, but she feels safe and loved here at the Technion. “I experienced solidarity, camaraderie, and community that you can’t experience anywhere else in the world. I am so happy that I came here and chose to study here. It was my dream to study here even before I knew what good people there were at the Technion.”

Since the beginning of the war, the Technion has begun absorbing evacuated residents from the south and north. Currently, about 60 people are hosted on campus in student dormitories and at the Forchheimer guest house at the Technion.

Nanopowders are the basis of many nanotechnologies; Technion researchers coin a new term in the field of nanomechanics: “pseudo-elasticity”

 “In the scientific world today, there are two central schools of thought regarding the way nanocrystals come into contact,” says Prof. Eugene Rabkin of the Faculty of Materials Engineering at the Technion. “One school asserts that the crystals homogenously stretch in order to stick together (elastic deformation), but once they adhere, they return to their original shape. According to the other school of thought, as they approach, the inter-atom forces are strong enough to overcome the individual nanocrystals’ strength and compel them to change shape irreversibly (plastic deformation).”

Metallic nanocrystals have an orderly atomic structure, and the way in which they can undergo plastic deformation is by creating a linear “defect” in the orderly atomic structure. These linear defects, which are called “dislocations”, were first observed under a microscope in the mid-1950s and since then they have served as an important basis for understanding the mechanical characteristics of materials. Because of the size of nanocrystals, they generally have a perfect atomic structure and do not have dislocations.

 “Justification for both schools of thought has been offered, yet without a way to resolve the contradiction between them,” adds Prof. Rabkin. “On the one hand, analytical models have shown that the stresses that are created in nanocrystals during the contact formation are large enough to create a large number of dislocations; on the other hand, in experimental observations, only isolated dislocations were observed in the nanocrystalline clusters, in contradiction to the models.”

In order to resolve the contradiction, the Technion researchers used advanced simulation tools that run on high-performance parallel computer located on campus. “The calculation is performed at the atomic level,” relates Dr. Dan Mordehai who today is a member of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technion, but who was a post-doctoral fellow in Prof. Rabkin’s group when the research was conducted. “We describe the nanocrystals using the atoms that comprise them and the forces between these atoms, and thus, we actually allow the atoms to choose their preferred “path”. These calculations include several hundreds of thousands of atoms and we have to execute them on parallel computer – that is, execute the calculation on a number of computers simultaneously.”

The Technion researchers found, for all intents and purposes, that neither of the schools of thought described the process in its entirety. In their simulation they showed that when the nanocrystals approach each other, the force of their interaction rises to become as great as that which creates many dislocations (as predicted by the second school of thought). Nevertheless, during the adhering process between the nanocrystals, additional dislocations are created, which “repair” the defects, and by the end of the adhering process, they no longer have any dislocations, as observed during experiments.

Thus the new nanomechanical term, coined by the Technion researchers, “pseudo-elasticity” was born. This mechanism enables nanocrystals to retain their original shape, despite the forces acting upon them, which are large enough to overcome their own strength limit. This mechanism may have great importance in many additional fields in contact mechanics for each pair of bodies that gets within a few nanometers of each other.

Prof. David Srolovitz, who is the head of the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore, participated in this research.

Above: Pictures of the simulations that were performed in the Technion show the process of contact formation between two nanocrystals. (Left) The atomic structure of nanocrystals before contact. (Right) The pseudo-elastic mechanism in action (1 to 8). In order to demonstrate the mechanism, only some of the atoms necessary for the process are shown. One can see that during the process of adhering, many defects are created (the atoms appear in dark grey in pictures 3-7), but at the end, the nanocrystals do not exhibit any defects (8). Illustration: Technion Spokesman.

The Technion is in 42^nd place in Engineering and Technology

Computer science at the Technion was ranked as 15^th in the world (among 500 universities) by the respected Shanghai Ranking published this week. Shanghai Jiaotong University published its list of university rankings – considered especially prestigious and reliable – http://www.shanghairanking.com/index.html. Harvard University tops the list, with MIT heading the engineering and technology rankings.

The Technion is ranked 42^nd in the world in engineering and technology and among the 75 leading universities in life sciences, mathematics and chemistry.

The Shanghai Ranking debuted in 2003 and is intended to improve the level of Chinese universities by comparing them to the top 500 universities in the world. The ranking is based on objective criteria and numerous data. Among the criteria – the number of Nobel Prize and other prestigious award winners, the number of scientific papers published in the leading journals – Nature and Science and other performance relative to the size of the university. The comprehensive Chinese research examines 1000 universities, including the top 500 ones.

Technion President, Prof. Peretz Lavie, said that the high ranking of the Technion in the computer field explains high position of the state of Israel in global high tech. “Research that is now being completed shows that Technion graduates do indeed lead the high tech sector that is moving Israel’s economy forward,” he said. “It turns out that 76% of Technion graduates in the last two decades work in the country’s high tech industry, which is responsible for 51% of the state of Israel’s industrial exports. Of these graduates, 25% are CEOs or deputy general managers, 21% hold other types of management positions, 10% are team leaders and 12.6% are involved in R&D. 59 out of 121 Israeli companies whose shares are traded on NASDAQ were established or are managed by Technion graduates.”

Approximately 700 students, from all over the north of the country, from 5^th grade through to 12^th grade, participated in two summer sessions given by the Science Programs for Youth division of the Technion. In addition, 44 young people participated in the international science camp, “SciTech 2011”.

This year the Science Programs for Youth division offered a range of programs in the areas of medicine, genetic engineering, developing mathematical thinking, aviation sciences, architecture, robotics, nano worlds and more. About 40 different classes were run and the most popular classes, by far, were the ones in robotics and architecture.

Classes were given in three different areas: natural sciences and engineering, basic skills and engineering and technology.

The classes are given by Technion students studying in different faculties who believe that in science and teaching, they are also conveying an important message to the young participants. In addition to the classes, the participants in the Science Programs for Youth also received a discount on entry fees to the Technion swimming pool and thus were able to enjoy the summer to the fullest.

The “SciTech” summer camp is an international science camp that takes place every summer at the Technion. This year’s camp marks its 18^th year. About 44 young men and women from Europe, Asia, the U.S. and Israel came to the Technion camp, which is aimed at youth aged 16-18 with a proven aptitude in science and technology who strive for academic excellence at the highest level. The camp is about four weeks long and combines scientific research with cultural and social activities. Afternoons and evenings are devoted to social activities and on certain days, the participants are taken on outings to see the country. This year’s tours were to Jerusalem, Caesarea, Kfar Blum, the Baha’i Gardens in Haifa and many other places.

The main objective of the camp is to expose young talented people to scientific and technological activity and research, as well as allow them an opportunity to work under the supervision of professional staff from the Technion, to build a bridge between science and the different cultures, to create relationships among students from all over world and to expose them to different aspects of Israeli society and history.

During the camp, the students work in pairs on projects at the cutting edge of Technion research, using the Technion’s equipment and labs. Toward the end of the camp, participants present their research projects by submitting a comprehensive report, a scientific poster presentation and a visual presentation.

The audience at these presentations is made up of the camp participants, the mentors, the academic staff and guests. The audience participates in choosing the best presentation in every scientific field.

The posters are displayed at a special exhibition during the camp’s closing ceremony. They are judged by a committee comprising senior scientists from the Technion as well as experts. The committee members select the best poster in each scientific field, with each winner getting a prize. The reports and posters appear in the annual “SciTech” review.