“I hope that my research will be another small step in the journey of mankind towards the nano revolution.”

We think out of the box


They see the future, and they hold it in their hands. Synthesizing knowledge and skills between different faculties, they bridge research labs and create something new. They are the graduate students of the new generation: the nano generation.

New structures like the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute (RBNI) move with the scientific and technological needs of tomorrow, facilitating intense multidisciplinary activity to rapidly and effectively give form to new frontiers of research. This is a vision that thinks ‘out of the box’, and over 300 graduate students at the Norman Seiden International Interdisciplinary Graduate School for Nano Science and Technology form a dynamic part of the ongoing revolution. Beyond their unity with RBNI’s high standards of excellence, these students are facilitators of collaboration, each pioneering whole new areas of nanoscience and technology. 

Yael Pascal-Levy is in her fifth semester as a PhD student in the program where she works under the supervision of Dr. Yuval Yaish and Prof. Yoav Eichen.

“I hope I will be able to demonstrate the electrical detection and identification of single biological molecules using carbon nanotube field-effect transistors,” she says. “The ability to make such highly sensitive and selective measurements, if could lead to enormous breakthroughs in DNA analysis, groundwater monitoring, clinical diagnostics and fundamental studies of physical and chemical phenomena at the single molecule level.”

RBNI Phd Student Yael Pascal Levy

“I hope that my research will be another small step in the journey of mankind towards the nano revolution.”

We think out of the box


They see the future, and they hold it in their hands. Synthesizing knowledge and skills between different faculties, they bridge research labs and create something new. They are the graduate students of the new generation: the nano generation.

New structures like the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute (RBNI) move with the scientific and technological needs of tomorrow, facilitating intense multidisciplinary activity to rapidly and effectively give form to new frontiers of research. This is a vision that thinks ‘out of the box’, and over 300 graduate students at the Norman Seiden International Interdisciplinary Graduate School for Nano Science and Technology form a dynamic part of the ongoing revolution. Beyond their unity with RBNI’s high standards of excellence, these students are facilitators of collaboration, each pioneering whole new areas of nanoscience and technology. 

Yael Pascal-Levy is in her fifth semester as a PhD student in the program where she works under the supervision of Dr. Yuval Yaish and Prof. Yoav Eichen.

“I hope I will be able to demonstrate the electrical detection and identification of single biological molecules using carbon nanotube field-effect transistors,” she says. “The ability to make such highly sensitive and selective measurements, if could lead to enormous breakthroughs in DNA analysis, groundwater monitoring, clinical diagnostics and fundamental studies of physical and chemical phenomena at the single molecule level.”

RBNI Phd Student Yael Pascal Levy

As of 2009, the ultra-Orthodox population in Israel numbered about 785,000. The government uses the rubric of whether men studied in yeshiva the last year to determine who is ultra-Orthodox. Modi’in Ilit tops the list with the highest proportion of ultra-Orthodox with 85.1% of all the men studying in yeshivas. Betar Ilit comes in second (84.8% ) followed by Bnei Brak (62.4% ), Elad (57% ), Rekhesim (54.8% ), Beit Shemesh (28.8% ) and Jerusalem (27% ).

The study shows a low rate of participation in the workforce in the ultra-Orthodox towns.

Workforce numbers show low rates in both Modi’in Ilit and Betar Ilit and only slightly higher rates among the ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, though in Elad, a mixed ultra-Orthodox national-religious city, there is a higher workforce rate. The same goes for heterogeneous neighborhoods of Beit Shemesh, Netanya and Ashdod.

“A heterogeneous makeup is likely to give the ultra-Orthodox population the possibility of enjoying the best of both worlds – the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood ‘world’ and the overall municipal ‘world,'” according to the document.

In favor of separation

Town planner and lawyer Prof. Rachelle Alterman, head of the Technion Graduate Program in Urban and Regional Planning, has a different opinion. Alterman was a member of the National Planning and Construction Council and a partner in the decision to establish the ultra-Orthodox town of Kasif.

She believes there is no scope for integrating the ultra-Orthodox into heterogeneous towns, even though homogeneous ultra-Orthodox towns will need more help from the public coffers.

“It’s very easy to preach against building ultra-Orthodox towns, but ultimately the heads of heterogeneous local authorities and populations are not interested in absorbing a large mass of ultra-Orthodox residents,” she said. “Clearly ultra-Orthodox towns or neighborhoods require a lot of funding but in my opinion not with a greater gap than other towns. However, the town of Kasif, which is slated to go up near Arad, could be a poverty trap because it is located far from sources of employment. It would have been better to build ultra-Orthodox towns and neighborhoods close to areas where there are jobs.” Alterman says heterogeneous towns are an economic and social falsehood.

“Are the national-religious in Beit Shemesh getting along well with the ultra-Orthodox population? They really aren’t,” she said. “There too the national religious are leaving. At the end of the day combining a non-ultra-Orthodox population with an ultra-Orthodox population means subordination to the ultra-Orthodox way of life and the other populations are not interested in this.”

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Toward a ‘culture of safety’ – JPost – Environment & Technology

Ergonomics is making inroads in the medical profession, helping prevent dangerous mistakes.

A fighter jet’s cockpit is probably the most ergonomic work environment there is. Every piece of equipment was planned to fit the human body, its movements and the user’s cognitive abilities – and was thus designed to be in the most logical place to get the job done efficiently and safely.

The average hospital is an incredibly complex mix of human capital, know-how and habits, together with drugs and other medical technologies that can heal but, if not used properly, can also cause damage or even kill. An estimated 1,000 to 2,000 Israelis die of medical errors each year; many more take ill and recover, or are victims of errors that fortunately do not take a toll.

Until ether was discovered and demonstrated in 1846 by a US dentist and made operations with anesthesia possible, many people refused to put their bodies in the hands of surgeons. But today, many people who need hospital care fear being harmed by medical errors, even if the risk is highly exaggerated.

MOST OF the mistakes that do occur, says the Hadassah Medical Organization’s Prof. Yoel Donchin, could have been prevented if medical management had established a “culture of safety.” But the health system is too often run with a risk-management mechanism that, after an error is committed, tries to minimize the financial damage of subsequent lawsuits. Donchin, a veteran anesthesiologist and an intensive-care physician, has devoted himself to patient safety for 20 years of his more than three decades at Hadassah. Even after his recent retirement from direct patient care, he remains head of the Patient Safety Unit at the Hebrew University- Hadassah Medical School.

DONCHIN HAS also just produced, with coauthor Prof. Daniel Gopher (an industrial engineering expert at Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology), a major Hebrew volume explaining exactly how hospitals can be made safer. Required reading for hospital directors, medical department heads, nurses, medical deans, nursing-school faculty, Health Ministry administrators and others close to the field, the 431-page, NIS 114 softcover is called Saviv Mitat Haholeh: Handasat Enosh Uvtihut Betipul Refui (Around the Patient’s Bed: The Human Factor and Safety in Health Care). It was published by Carta, the Hadassah Medical Organization, and the Technion.

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Finally, the ‘ultimate’ carbon nanotube development

By Barry Copping

Nanotube strength enhancement will emulate Kevlar technologyAn industrial-scale production process for manufacturing pure carbon nanotube fibres could lead to “revolutionary” advances in materials science, power distribution and nanoelectronics, according to a joint research team from three establishments – Houston-based Rice University and the University of Pennsylvania in the USA, and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

Rice University scientists claim to have found the “ultimate” solvent for all kinds of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), bringing the creation of a highly electrically conductive quantum nanowire closer.

The researchers regard working with long nanotubes (made by a process analogous to polymerisation) as key to attaining exceptional physical attributes in fibres, because both their mechanical and electrical properties depend on the length of the constituent nanotubes. Using longer nanotubes should enhance fibre properties by one to two orders of magnitude, say the team, and similarly enhanced properties should also be expected in thin films of carbon nanotubes being investigated for flexible electronics applications.

Professor Matteo Pasquali, a team member and author of a research paper in the ACS Nano journal commented: “Plastics is a $300 billion US industry because of the massive throughput that’s possible with fluid processing. The reason grocery stores use plastic bags instead of paper and the reason polyester shirts are cheaper than cotton is that polymers can be melted or dissolved and processed as fluids by the [railway wagon] load. Processing nanotubes as fluids opens up all of the fluid processing technology that has been developed for polymers.”

Co-author Wade Adams added: “[Our] research established an industrially relevant process for nanotubes that was analogous to the methods used to create Kevlar from rodlike polymers, except for the acid not being a true solvent.

“The current research shows that we have a true solvent for nanotubes– chlorosulfonic acid – which is what we set out to find when we started this project nine years ago.”

Kevlar, the para-aramid polymer synthetic fibre used in bulletproof vests, is about five to ten times stronger than the strongest nanotube fibres today, but in principle the Rice scientists expect to make their fibres about 100 times stronger.

“Nature” reveals: Technion researchers solve the mystery of how long-term coexistence is possible between photosynthetic bacteria and the viruses that infect them.

Dr Debbie Lindell

How is long-term coexistence possible between bacteria in the oceans and the viruses that infect them? This question has intrigued researchers for many years. Now Technion scientists from the Faculty of Biology provide an answer, reveals the prestigious journal “Nature”. This coexistence is enabled by a high level of variability within bacterial populations for the genes used by viruses to attach to and infect the bacteria.

Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic bacteria that carry out photosynthesis in a manner similar to plants. Their ecological importance lies in the production of sugars that are the basis of the food web in the oceans, and in the production of oxygen that all organisms on earth breathe. Furthermore, cyanobacteria take up carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas responsible for climate change, and in this way help reduce its level in the atmosphere.

Coexistence between large numbers of cyanobacteria and the viruses that infect them has been going on for millions of years, enabling the cyanobacteria to continue fulfilling their important ecological role. This is despite the fact that, in theory, viral populations should have caused the collapse of such large populations of cyanobacteria.

One of the hypotheses that can explain the coexistence of both cyanobacteria and viruses is that the population of cyanobacteria consists of individuals resistant to viruses as well as those that are sensitive to them. However, the mechanism that enables this was not previously known.

“We looked for cyanobacteria that are resistant to viruses in order to determine what facilitates their resistance”, said the researchers, Doctor Debbie Lindell and the doctoral student Sarit Avrani. “We used new technology that enabled us to sequence the entire genome of the resistant cyanobacteria at a reasonable cost, which allowed us to carry out an in depth study by assessing many strains”.

They took strains of cyanobacteria and viruses and mixed them together. “Most of the cyanobacteria die because the viruses kill them”, explains Sarit. “The few that survive are cyanobacteria that the viruses couldn’t infect. We extracted and sequenced their genomes and found the mutations and their position in the genome that lead to resistance. Most of the mutations were in genes that are responsible for the formation of proteins that affect the structure of the outer surface of the cyanobacteria. These mutations prevent the viruses from entering the cyanobacteria cell.”

The researchers worked in collaboration with Dr. Itai Sharon, a post-doctoral fellow at the Technion, and with Dr. Rotem Sorek and the doctoral student Omri Wurtzel from the Weizmann Institute of Science.

The researchers found that most of the mutations were located in a specific region of the genome called a “genomic island”. This is one of five “genomic islands” known in this group of cyanobacteria. These islands are regions of the genome made up of genes that are entirely different between the different individuals in a population in nature. This concoction of genes originates, not from their ancestors but from other organisms entirely. In contrast, most of the genome is made up of the same genes organized in the exact same order in all the individuals in a population.

The significance of the position of these mutations in the genomic island is that only a small part of the population contains genes that enable a particular virus to infect it, and a different part of the population contains different genes that enable a different virus to infect them, and so on. As such, the cyanobacterial population is made up of many sub-groups, each of which can be infected by a different part of the viral population. In this situation, chances are low that a virus will be able to infect a suitable cyanobacterium during its life. In this manner, the collapse of the cyanobacterial population is prevented and long-term coexistence results.

Additional implications of these findings are that through this mechanism, viruses “encourage” the presence of a high diversity of genes in the genomic island in the cyanobacterial population, and in this way influence their genome evolution. This diversity is likely to enable cyanobacteria to adapt to changing environmental conditions.