Israel Active

The recently inaugurated Be’er Tuviya biogas plant owned by Israel’s Eco-Energy will scoop up the waste of 14,000 cows and in total roughly 15% of all chicken and dairy farms in the country. All that manure will then be used to generate 4MW of electricity for powering around 6,000 homes.

Israel and the USA have expanded their 21-year-old environmental Memorandum of Understanding to include research development, information sharing, green technology development, water sources management, land rehabilitation, air quality and ecological economy ventures.

Israelis Arik Bar-Erez and Kobi Rein have invented Q-Fog – the world’s first spray device for cyclists. The lightweight Q-Fog provides 400 sprays of cooling water that evaporates of your body. The Israelis are now seeking funding via crowdsourced fundraising site Indiegogo.

Israeli high school students beat 80 other countries to win first prize at the 20th annual First Step to Nobel Prize in Physics competition, held in Warsaw. 14 Israelis won prizes including overall first for Yuval Katznelson, for his research of energy in unique gases found in charcoal fibres.

The Israeli pavilion took pride of place at the Acodal 2012 Water Congress in Bogota, Colombia. 14 Israeli companies were represented. Colombian companies recognize the Israeli water industry as a world leader in innovative solutions.

During the feast of Succot (Tabernacles), the city of Kfar Saba is hosting a unique type of municipal Succa – a “Solar Succa,” to operate on solar energy only. The solar panels, on the environmentally friendly booth, absorb the sun’s energy during the day and operate LED lights during darkness hours.

Watch the new video from the Jewish Virtual Library.

(Thanks to NoCamels) Israeli startup Hoozin has launched a social group-messaging app for mobile smart-phone users that aims to simulate the way interactions between groups of people happen in real life. Hoozin displays users as if sitting around a table, where messages are ‘stacked’ much like playing cards.

The 290-meter high production platform for Israel’s Tamar natural gas field is taller than Israel's tallest skyscraper. The platform has left Texas, after 18 months of construction, and will arrive in Israel on board the largest barge of its kind. Production at the Tamar field is scheduled to begin in March 2013, and will (hopefully) supply natural gas to the Israeli economy for decades.

Israeli Technion graduate Maria Chudnovsky has just been awarded a $500,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation. As professor at Columbia University she has succeeded in proving “graph classification theory” and now works on real-world applications of the theory.