Finding a needle in a haystack
Israeli start-up SphereUp has developed a smart contact search which can find anyone on a website, contact database, or any other information source. The search is nearly instantaneous, eliminates duplicates and displays only the relevant data.
The Agri-tech road-show
Five Israeli agriculture technology start-ups are shortly to tour the US, seeking investors. They include use SolChip (solar powered livestock tracking sensors), EdenShield (natural herbs to prevent insect infestation of plants) and MiRobot (robot milking machine – see above).
The future is aluminum
More details about the evolutionary aluminum-air battery of the Israeli-based technology company Phinergy. It powers an electric vehicle (EV) for up to 1,000 miles (1600 km) before needing a recharge – three times longer than existing EVs. It certainly impressed US President Obama.
And yet another innovative battery
Tel Aviv’s Enstorage has produced the first ever grid-connected Hydrogen-Bromine (HBr) flow battery. The 50 KW battery provides up to 100 KWh of energy. It is the cheapest, smallest and most powerful flow batteries on the market.
Developing renewable energy together
Ben Gurion University and the University of Michigan are to forge a research partnership on developing renewable technologies. The three-year program will research advanced vehicle fuels, solar energy and thermoelectric materials, which convert heat to electricity.
A house for the Sustainable Olympics
30 Israeli students have built an energy self-sufficient four-room house that will compete in the Solar Decathlon event in China in August. It is solar-powered, has disabled access, a garden irrigated by recycled water and the renewable energy products of several Israeli companies.
A UAV in your backpack
A new unmanned drone from Israel’s Elbit Systems is a game-changer for the IDF. It takes 8 minutes to assemble, launched from a bungee cord, flies at 15,000 feet for three hours and its on-board camera shows exactly what is happening on the ground.
Clean panels for more solar power
Frequent Middle-East storms can coat solar panes with dust, reducing their efficiency substantially. Sergey Biryukov at Ben Gurion University’s National Solar Energy Center came up with the idea of using an electrical field to “charge” the dust particles and repel them from the solar panels.
The dark side of the Internet
Ben Gurion University engineer Mark Last has developed a system for detecting websites used for illegal military activities. It analyzes the occurrence of certain words and highlights those sites with an unusually high frequency of them. The system has near-perfect success rates.
Happy 40th birthday to the cell phone
The International media is full of news of the first cell phone call made in 1973 by Martin Cooper of Motorola. They are strangely silent about the fact that much of the technology was developed at Motorola’s Haifa development center.