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Shanghai Ranking 2016 establishes Technion’s place among top global academic institutions  

The Shanghai Ranking placed Technion 69th in the index of the world’s leading academic institutions, the top position for any Israeli institute

Technion confirms its place in the list of the world’s 100 leading academic institutions, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities (known as ShanghaiRanking) published Monday, August 15. Technion’s overall ranking rose from 77th place in 2015 to 69th place, placing it highest among Israel’s universities on the list.

Technion consistently scores high in the field of Computer Science (15th-18th place over the past five years). This year, for the first time, the Shanghai Ranking  included a specific Ranking for Electrical and Electronic Engineering, in which Technion ranked 39th (the highest placement for an Israeli institution in that field).

“We are proud and pleased with this official recognition of Technion’s prominent status in the global arena,” said Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie following the publication of the Ranking. “This is the most important ranking in the world of academia, and this year it places us not only highest among Israel’s academic institutions and in an excellent position globally, but also in a particularly impressive place in the field of electrical and electronic engineering, in addition to the high rankings in engineering and computer engineering.

Technion’s consistent rise in the Shanghai Ranking proves that we are doing the right thing by investing unprecedented effort in recruiting the best faculty members and nurturing our students, who represent the best that Israel has to offer. Thus we are being proactive in fulfilling Technion’s vision to be “A science and technology research university, among the world’s top ten, dedicated to the creation of knowledge and the development of human capital and leadership, for the advancement of the State of Israel and all humanity.”

The Shanghai ranking was launched in 2003 with the aim to clarify the standing of Chinese universities in comparison to the world’s top 500 universities. The rating is based on objective criteria and extensive data, including the number of Nobel laureates and winners of other prestigious awards, the number of scientific papers published in the leading journals Nature and Science, and performance in other areas relative to the size of the university.

The comprehensive Chinese study encompasses some 1,200 universities to produce the list of the world’s top 500. The 2016 list is headed once again by U.S. universities – Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley – with the UK’s University of Cambridge ranked in 4th place.

Click here for the complete Ranking

The Shanghai Ranking was published shortly after the Nature Index Ranking, which ranked Technion 26th in its 2016 list of Rising Stars, following a 40% increase in Technion’s publications in leading scientific journals. The list includes 100 institutions around the world that recorded the most significant progress in research between 2012 and 2015. The 100 institutions – almost all of them universities – are ranked by the increase in their contribution to 68 high-quality journals.

 

Technion’s international program enters its fifth year

Graduation ceremony held for graduates in Civil and Environmental Engineering

14/08/2016

The fourth class of Technion’s international BSc program in Civil and Environmental Engineering graduated on August 4, 2016. The ceremony was attended by Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie, Director of Technion International Prof. Anat Rafaeli, and Technion Vice President for Strategic Projects Prof. Paul Feigin.

The 15 members of the Class of 2016 are nationals of Nepal, Turkey, the USA, Venezuela, Canada, China, Israel, Spain, and Germany. Two of them, Mona Kolgasi and Timothy Nesher, said that “despite the fact that we came from all over the world and from different cultures, we became a family. This is one of the most significant moments of our lives. From now on we are engineers, and as engineers we must always think about how to improve the world and leave our mark on it.”

Prof. Rafaeli introduced the international studies program and said: “I am pleased to announce that additional Technion faculties, including the faculties of Chemistry, Physics, Chemical Engineering, and Medicine, have undertaken to grant international degrees.”

President Lavie thanked the parents of the graduates for their faith in the Technion, wished the graduates success in their future endeavors, and noted: “Following your success and that of your predecessors, the Technion has decided on global expansion as a strategic objective. In the years to come, we will develop additional international curricula – at the Faculty of Chemical Engineering, the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, and the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering, in addition to advanced studies at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering. I hope some of you will continue to advanced studies, and when you’re finished you return to the Technion.”

Technion is the only Israeli representative on Nature Index 2016 Rising Stars list

Ranked 26th in the world in the list of 2016 Rising Stars, following a 40% increase in the Technion’s publications in leading scientific journals

The Technion is in 26th place in the Rising Stars list published by Nature Index. The list includes 100 institutions around the world that recorded the most significant progress in research in 2012-2015. The 100 institutions – virtually all of them universities – are ranked by the increase in their contribution to 68 high-quality journals that comprise the Nature Index.

The greatest achievements were recorded by Chinese universities:Nine Chinese institutions in total occupy the top 10 positions, and the list of 100 includes 40 Chinese institutions. This is in comparison with just 11 US institutions, nine British, eight German and only one Israeli: Technion.

The index, as stated, shows the increase in the number of publications, and in the case of the Technion this represents a 40% increase in the said period: from a score of 68.75 in 2012, when the index was published for the first time, to a score of 95.59 in 2015. (Click here for a breakdown of the figures)

“Nature is one of the world’s leading scientific journals, and it is a great honor for us to be included in its Rising Stars list,” said Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie. “The Index is further evidence of Technion’s academic excellence, the incessant improvement in the achievements of its researchers and our constant progress in realizing Technion’s vision: to be one of the world’s ten leading science and technology research universities. To this end, we are working on recruiting dozens of outstanding new faculty members every year and expanding our academic and international research activities.”

Many of the institutions on the list are really new stars, which significantly increased the number of publications in high-quality scientific journals. For example, South Korea’s new Institute for Basic Science increased its contribution to high-quality journals by more than 4,000% in four years, and is now ranked 11th on the list.

Nature Index is published by Nature Research, member of the Springer Nature Group. Springer Nature is the world’s largest academic publishing house, which publishes the most influential journals, and a pioneer in the field of open research. The Nature Research Division distributes the prestigious journal Nature (founded in 1869) and many other journals, and operates additional services for the scientific community.

David Swinbanks, Founder of the Nature Index, said: “The Nature Index is an increasingly powerful tool to assess research performance. By identifying these rising stars, we’re given an insight into which new emerging institutions are likely to play a role in addressing some of the globe’s most pressing challenges.”

More information about Nature Index is available at:http://www.nature.com/nature/supplements/nature-index-rising-stars

International Chemistry Olympiad: Technion trained Israeli delegation wins two medals: silver and bronze

Two of the four Israeli representatives at the International Chemistry Olympiad, held last week in the city of Tbilisi in Georgia, won the silver and bronze medals. The four high school students trained at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s Schulich Faculty of Chemistry and practiced there in recent months. The winners are: Ron Solan of Rishonim High School in Herzliya (silver medal) and Rina Sevostianov from Makif Gimmel High School in Ashdod (bronze medal). The other team members were Ophir Shmul from the Israel Arts and Science Academy in Jerusalem and Guy Harduf from Rishonim High School in the Harod Valley.

The International Chemistry Olympiad, held for the past 48 years, is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads for high school students. Participating this year in the Olympiad in Tbilisi, Georgia, were 264 students from 66 countries. The academic challenge faced by the students in the competition included a written test and a lab experiment, in which the students were required to synthesize a substance, kinetically monitor a chemical reaction and identify unknown substances based on chemical reactions. The Israeli delegation was trained and accompanied by Prof. Zeev Gross, head of Technion’s youth programs in chemistry and faculy member in Technion’s Schulich Faculty of Chemistry and Dr. Iris Barzilai – lab engineer at the Analytical Chemistry Lab. During the training, the delegation was prepared by chief trainer Dr. Izana Nigel-Ettinger. Ms. Mira Katz, director of youth projects at the Faculty, was responsible for administration and logistics. The delegation also received considerable assistance from faculty members, doctoral students and lab engineers at the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry.

“The material that the members of the delegation were tested on in the Olympiad was very advanced, far ahead of the chemistry taught in Israeli high schools,” said Prof. Gross. “The four members of the Israeli team are outstanding among the thousands of students who participated in the screening process. The students attended intensive preparation camps to bring them to the desired level.  We are pleased that two members of the delegation – Ron and Rina – won medals, and we are very proud.”

Students at the Technion have developed a system that informs the user whether the Faculty prayer room is occupied or vacant and whether the worshipers are men or women. It does this with the aid of sensors alone, and without using a camera, which could violate the worshippers’ privacy

Mosallah (مصلى) is the name of an original system for monitoring the presence of worshippers in the Muslim prayer room at the Technion Faculty of Computer Science. The unique app can identify the current stage of the prayer and, according to this information, the system can estimate when the prayer will end. The innovative system was developed by three students at the Technion Faculty of Computer Science – female students Anwar Dabur and Lina Mudalej and male student Bakr Odeh – as their final project in the course on systems programming in an Arduino environment, held in conjunction with Microsoft R&D.

Dabur relates, “It all started two years ago, when the Faculty provided its Muslim students with a mosallah (dedicated prayer room).  It was of course a very important step for us Muslims who want to pray during the day, but we soon found that there was a little problem: a person who wants to pray in the room has no way of knowing whether it’s vacant or occupied.”

Unlike prayers with many participants, where men and women gather in the same hall, prayer in small prayer rooms is not mixed. “Therefore it is important for us to know not only if the room is occupied but also who is inside – men or women. We realized that this was a very complex challenge, but we are students at the Technion – there’s no way we would fail to solve all those problems.”

During the past year, the project year, the three visited many prayer rooms in order to analyze the characteristics that could be monitored during prayers in the mosallah, and developed the system, constantly improving it based on experiments. From the outset, it was clear to them that cameras would not be used, because they violate the worshiper’s privacy. Therefore they developed a smart prayer rug equipped with pressure sensors. The rug provides the system with information enabling it to determine whether the worshippers in the room are men or women. “Women and men pray differently,” Dabur explains. “When men pray, one of the worshippers stands in front and the others behind, while women pray in a single row. The order in which they kneel is also different. Therefore, based on the information obtained from the pressure sensors, we can determine the gender of the worshipers without entering the room.”

The system developed by the three students includes pressure and distance sensors, an Arduino controller and servo motor; software that analyzes the data; and a dedicated app that sends the user prayer reminders on his mobile phone and tells him when the prayer room is vacant or partly vacant. The system can also be used without a smartphone, thanks to an interactive interface based on an LCD touch screen installed outside the prayer room, enabling the user to obtain relevant data and inform the system that he is waiting outside.

“Using the system saves the user a lot of time. Everyone knows that time is a rare commodity when you’re a student at the Technion,” concludes Lina. “This way, instead of standing in line to enter the prayer room, I study at the library and when I see on my phone that the room is vacant, I go there to pray. In the future, we intend to turn the app into a tool for learning prayers and the special movements that go with them.”

The course on systems programming in an Arduino environment is held in conjunction with Microsoft R&D, and enables students to use technology and state-of-the-art software during their studies, including smartphones and tablets for running apps during the development phase.  In the course, which is designed to challenge the students with independent product-building projects, the students design smart systems that combine hardware and software using Arduino-based controllers connected to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud.

Arthur C. Clarke Panel

A study from the lab of Prof. Noam Adir of the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology: natural evolutionary processes prevent the presence of dangerous and potentially lethal molecular interactions by avoiding the presence of specific protein sequences in microorganisms. They found these sequences by a novel method – looking for what is missing in biological data sets. The group then experimentally showed that when these sequences are present in a protein, bacterial growth is indeed inhibited. The study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA.

Evolution is an ongoing process, whereby those individuals of species that are the most fit for their environment have more offspring and thus out-compete less fit individuals. The individual’s fitness is a product of the quality of its cellular biochemistry, made possible by the thousands of enzymes that allow its physiology to perform all of the necessary chemical reactions that allow the cell to live. Deficiency in these molecular functions can lead to disease, loss of adaptability to environmental changes, or weakness against other organisms. The molecular machines that make life possible are large polymers made up of linear sequences of building blocks that contain different chemical functions: proteins, DNA, and RNA. Biological variety is a result of the evolutionary changes in these polymers, first and foremost the result of the astronomic number of possible permutations in the order of the 20 naturally occurring amino acid (AA) residues that are the building blocks of proteins. There are 8,000 possible sequences of three AAs, 160,000 sequences of four AAs, over 3 million sequences of five AAs and so on. Since proteins can contain between hundreds to thousands of AAs, the possibilities are endless.

The millions of different protein sequences found in all organisms determine the three-dimensional structures that give proteins the ability to function correctly. Proteins in cells can work alone or associate correctly with other cellular components, while avoiding incorrect and harmful associations with other components. Changes to the sequences naturally occur due to mutations (single site, or larger changes due to more dramatic sequence shuffling) of an organism’s DNA – the genetic material. Changes due to mutations can lead to new positive characteristics, or they may have negative consequences to the organism’s viability. A mutation that has a negative effect may prevent the organism from competing with other organisms in its environment, eventually leading to its demise. One could predict that over time, evolutionary pressure would work against the presence of organisms containing these internally lethal sequences and they would disappear.

Over the past few years, there has been a world-wide effort to obtain the entire DNA sequences (the entire genomes) of many organisms. These data have given us the ability to predict all of the possible protein sequences (the proteome) that might exist in organisms as simple as bacteria or as complicated as humans. Prof. Adir and his students, Dr. Sharon Penias-Navon and Ms. Tali Schwartzman, hypothesized that the huge amount of data made available by modern genomics would allow them to look for short sequences that occur less often than expected or are completely missing in the organism’s proteome. They developed a computer program that searched the many existing data sets to identify short sequences that are underrepresented (URSs). While they found that most of the sequences of three or four AAs indeed do exist at their expected frequency in the proteins of different organisms, URSs do exist. They used the program to search for URSs in the proteomes of many different organisms (especially pathogenic microorganisms) and found that different organisms have different URSs.  Adir and Penias-Navon wanted to prove that these URSs are indeed harmful, and they hypothesized that protein synthesis (translation) by the ribosome is the function that URSs might harm.

They embedded bacterial URSs (identified in the proteome of the gut bacterium E. coli) comprised of three or four AAs in a normal protein sequence, and showed that no matter where they put the URS, protein translation was inhibited. They showed that these same E. coli URSs had no effect on protein translation in human cells, showing that the effect is species specific. They further showed that one four-AA URS was powerful enough to inhibit translation completely to the point where the growth of the bacterial cells was significantly reduced: these are indeed lethal sequences. Adir and Navon suggested that URSs could be used as highly specific anti-microbial agents, and a patent, together with the Technion, was submitted.

In order to obtain even more precise molecular details on the action of the URS, they initiated a collaboration with Prof. Joseph Puglisi and his student Dr. Guy Kornberg of Stanford University, who are experts in following protein translation in single ribosomes, thereby obtaining direct information on the translation reaction mechanism. Using these single molecule methods, the inhibitory effect of the existence of a URS on translation was confirmed. Their methods enabled a precise determination of the site of inhibition. They found that as soon as the URS AAs enter the entrance to the ribosomal nascent protein exit tunnel, translation is inhibited.

Dr. Buzz Aldrin, the man who landed on the moon with Neil Armstrong: “Mankind does not need to visit Mars or conquer it, but rather to build a permanent settlement there”

“I have no doubt that I am lucky. My mother was born the year when the Wright brothers made the first flights in history, and my father was a pioneer in the world of aviation. I just I flew jets in the Korean War and made spacewalks, and yet – I got to go to the moon.”

These remarks were made on Tuesday, July 26, by Buzz Aldrin, one of the most famous astronauts in history, in a lecture at the Technion. Aldrin, who was born in January 1930 in New Jersey as Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr., is best known as one of the first two astronauts who set foot on the moon. The younger generation is also familiar with him thanks to Buzz Lightyear – the hero of the movie Toy Story – who was named after Aldrin.

The first landing on the moon, featuring Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, took place 47 years ago this month – on July 20, 1969. Armstrong descended from the landing module to the moon, followed by Aldrin, who described the scenery as “magnificent desolation” – as he later called his autobiography. They placed the US flag and a commemorative plaque on the moon, carried out a few predetermined scientific missions and spoke with then US President Richard Nixon. Then they boarded the landing module and returned to Columbia – the command nodule – where their fellow astronaut Michael Collins was waiting for them, orbiting the moon while they were on it.

Dr. Aldrin, a West Point graduate and former fighter pilot, received his Ph.D. from MIT. The subject of his doctoral thesis was manned rendezvous in space. The rendezvous methods that he developed in his thesis and subsequently are still in use today, and have earned him the nickname Dr. Rendezvous. In 1963 he was accepted into the ranks of NASA as an astronaut and became known mainly for his record breaking Gemini 12 spacewalk (1966) and the Apollo 11 moon landing (1969).

Apollo 11 was the peak of the Apollo program, announced by US President John F. Kennedy (JFK) in his famous speech in which he set the goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Kennedy, assassinated in 1963, did not live to see his dream realized.

The main mission of the Apollo crew was a manned landing on the moon, and more than half a billion TV viewers followed Armstrong descending the landing module’s ladder and saying: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Aldrin descended about twenty minutes later and together they carried out the predetermined tasks, including walking on the moon, collecting soil samples, installing a TV camera to broadcast images from the moon to earth, and placing a plaque bearing a message of peace to any living creatures who finds it. Four days later, on July 24, 1969, Apollo 11 landed in the Pacific Ocean.

“We were given an opportunity to land on the moon, and the opportunity became a landmark event that changed the history of mankind,” said Dr. Aldrin at his lecture on Tuesday. “Mankind has managed to set foot in a new and completely different place. Four hundred thousand people were involved in the success of this mission and a half billion were watching us making history. When we returned from there we were greeted as heroes, but the world cheered not only us but what we represented: conquering the impossible.”

The Mars mission

Dr. Aldrin has never rested on his laurels, and for the past three decades he has spent most of his time on the next mission: populating Mars. “I’m not talking about a visit to Mars, or about occupation or even about having people coming and going to Mars; I’m talking about a permanent presence. My plan presents a define path to mankind’s next home.”

To this end, he founded the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute in Florida, which is working to promote settlement on Mars, with the target year being 2040. “Mars is the island awaiting us in the darkness of space, so get your ass to Mars. Because there, as President Kennedy said about the moon landing mission, a rendezvous with destiny is awaiting us.

International Space University

Aldrin’s lecture at the Technion was held as part of the SSP2016 session held at the Technion by the International Space University (ISU). Aldrin is currently serving as chancellor of ISU, and the lecture was dedicated to the memory of Gerald Soffen, one of the ISU’s biggest supporters. Prof. Finn Gurfil, head of the Asher Space Research Institute at Technion, thanked Dr. Aldrin for coming to the Technion and said: “People ask why invest in space, and the answer lies in an entire generation that grew into engineering and science thanks to space. The Technion is also involved in many aspects of space exploration, because this is our commitment: to make the hidden visible, and to make the unknown known.”

The International Space University (ISU) was founded in 1987 in Massachusetts, USA, and currently operates from Strasbourg, France. It is supported by major space agencies and aerospace organizations from around the world. Click here for more information about SSP16 – the summer program of the International Space University, currently held at the Technion: ssp16.isunet.edu

Researchers at the Technion Faculty of Medicine have uncovered a potential course of action of the placebo effect. The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, indicates the effect of positive expectations on the immune system

For the first time, Technion researchers have indicated a possible course of action of the placebo effect in the context of the impact of an optimistic mindset on the operation of the immune system. According to the findings, the brain’s “reward system” transmits messages via the sympathetic nervous system that affect the immune system’s efficiency.

The article, published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine, presents the work of Assistant Professor Asya Rolls from the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, carried out in cooperation with her colleague at the Faculty, Assistant Professor Shai Shen-Orr. The study was led by Tamar Ben-Shaanan, a doctoral student in the lab of Assistant Professor Rolls.

Significant Applications

“Our study explains how areas of the brain associated with positive emotions can affect the body’s coping with diseases,” explains Assistant Professor Rolls. “Placebo is a complex phenomenon in which the patient’s expectation of recovery affects his state of health. Expectation of improvement and arousal of positive emotions are reflected in the activity of neurons in the brain.  Therefore we decided to understand, at the molecular level, how areas of the brain associated with positive feelings affect the functioning of the immune system, which is basically the body’s main defense system. We have no doubt that an understanding the mechanisms connecting the brain to this system could lead to significant medical applications based on the effect of the mind on the body.”

We are all familiar with the effect of the mind on the immune system. Sometimes mental stress leads to poor physical condition, and sometimes a good mood alleviates the sensation of pain. One of the most fascinating expressions of the influence of one’s mental state on physical health is the placebo-effect: the effect of sham treatment, for example a sugar pill, on a person’s physical condition. Since this is an absolutely genuine effect, the authorities now require the existence of a “placebo group” in every drug approval process; since only with such a group is it possible to determine the chemical and physiological effects of the test drug on patients, disregarding the placebo effect. In this process it turns out, in many cases, that the test drug is not more effective than the placebo – both achieve improvements.

The research group of Assistant Professor Rolls examined the effect of the “reward system” – a brain region that is triggered in anticipation of a positive experience and is also stimulated during the placebo effect. Using innovative technological means, the researchers triggered the reward system in the brains of mice and examined the behavior of the immune system following this intervention. The findings show that triggering the reward system stimulates the immune system, that is, causes it to operate more effectively and eliminate bacteria more quickly.  Moreover, as a result of the intervention the immune system created a more robust immune memory against the bacteria it was exposed to. In other words – it will operate more effectively next time it is exposed to the same bacteria.

Innovative Technology

“Our breakthrough was made possible thanks to two new technologies,” explains Assistant Professor Shen-Orr. “One is DREADD technology, which enables precise activation of specific neurons, and the second is CyTOF technology, which enables high resolution characterization of hundreds of thousands of cells in the immune system. By coupling these two technologies, we were able to demonstrate a causal connection between the activation of specific neural circuits in the brain and the increased activity of cell populations in the immune system.

In the brain context, the researchers focused on the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a key component in the dopamine reward system. “This is the area of expectation for a reward positive,” explains Assistant Professor Rolls, “and it is stimulated, for example, when someone offers us a bar of chocolate. Stimulation of this area, as we found, stimulates the immune system’s anti-bacterial response, especially if stimulation occurs before exposure to bacterial infection.

The researchers also mapped the route through which the message passes from the brain to the immune system; the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for immediate response in emergency situations and stress. “This is the system that dilates the pupils, accelerates the heartbeat and makes our hair stand on end when we’re under stress. So it is no wonder that this is the system through which the brain sends the immune system a message to be on the ‘alert’ in the case of a bacterial infection, and even in the case of a tumor. Now, as stated, it turns out that even the thought or anticipation of something good or a reward, is able to stimulate this system and increase the activity of the immune system.”

According to Assistant Professor Rolls, this is the first scientific study conducted with an experimental animal model, indicating the connection between the brain’s dopamine activity and the immune system’s antibacterial activity. “This study demonstrates that the immune system is NOT completely autonomous and opens the possibility of stimulating it to act by a direct effect on the brain. Understanding that stimulating the VTA in the brain triggers the immune system will allow us to optimize existing therapies against infections and boost the effectiveness of vaccines.”

An Evolutionary Advantage

This is how Assistant Professor Rolls explains the effect of the brain on the immune system. The brain sees the big picture of the body and its environment, and therefore it can prioritize actions and direct the immune system. “Moreover, such a connection between the reward system and the immune system may have an evolutionary advantage. The reward system is activated in situations such as a good meal and sex, situations that expose us to bacteria and contaminants. Thus, it makes sense to couple reward activation and infection. Moreover, if we enjoyed that activity it is likely we will repeat it in the future and therefore it is in the body’s interests to create a stronger immune memory against these bacteria in order to overcome them next time.”