Israel Active

The Design Museum in Holon is running a unique international competition - to design and build a prototype of a shaded open space. 17 teams from Israel, USA, UK, six European countries, Chile and Turkey aim to advance the transformation of public spaces in countries with similar climates to Israel.

Tel Aviv University is to open the country’s first National Research Institute for Transportation Innovation. The institute will receive NIS 13.5 million in funding for the next five years. Entrepreneurs will be invited to perform research in the Porter School and receive financial support.

Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have found the deepest cave so far discovered in Israel. Located near Israel’s border with Lebanon, the cave is 187 meters below ground - 30 meters deeper than the previous Israeli record-holder, which was mapped 30 years ago.

Da Vinci defined the mechanics that drive earthquakes over 500 years ago, but he wasn’t accurate. New research by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has demonstrated that friction can only occur when the connections between the surfaces are first ruptured in an orderly process.

You would expect that engineers at Israel’s Technion could build quickly, but time-lapse photography reduces the construction time for the new D. Dan and Betty Kahn Mechanical Engineering building down to just sixty seconds!

Israel’s energy cyber security firm Nation-E plans to launch its energy cyber security center in Hadera on September 15. Companies worldwide can evaluate microgrids, smart meters, and all grid-connected devices, and determine how and why attackers are able to infringe their networks.

Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Yeshiva University of New York will together study colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals - tiny synthetic particles containing metal impurities with intriguing implications for the electronics, solar energy and biological fields.

(Thanks to Atid-EDI) Israel’s Mellanox has launched the world’s first 100Gb/s EDR InfiniBand switch. Switch-IB is the world’s fastest computer switch with 36-ports of 100Gb/s to provide 7.2Tb/s of switching capacity - 250 percent higher than any alternative and ideal for data centers.

(Thanks to Atid-EDI) Israeli-Arab start-up SolidRun has developed another tiny computer. The credit-card-size Hummingboard HB-i1 has 512MB RAM, two USB ports, a Fast Ethernet network port, Freescale's i.MX6 system on chip, 1GHz ARM A9 core and costs from $45.

For the first time ever, an Israeli team won the International Mathematics Competition, held this year in Bulgaria. The four Tel Aviv University and two Technion students received 355 points -- 38 more than the second-place group.