Israel Active

30 male and female undergraduate YU science majors will spend seven weeks of the summer carrying out their research in Bar-Ilan University's state-of-the-art laboratories in Tel Aviv.

Good video clip summarising Israel Technion’s involvement in the building of New York’s Technion Cornell Innovation Institute.

The magazine Scientific American has featured 28-year-old Israeli physicist Eldad Kepten in its “30 under 30” list of future possible Nobel Laureates. Kepten’s speciality is the stochastic dynamics of chromatin (DNA) in the cellular nucleus with advanced microscopy and single particle tracking. Wonderful!

In 2005, an Israeli F16 plane crashed on landing. The front was completely shattered, its tail was broken, the wings were curved, and the engine was filled with mud. Seven years later, the plane has been repaired and the original pilot and navigator took it back into the air.

Tel Aviv-based Netline Communications Technologies has made one of the smallest jammers ever for stopping improvised explosive devices (IEDs). It was made after a NATO country sought a "handball sized" jammer that elite units like Special Forces could carry in an urban operation.

Dozens of volunteers are working to turn Israel into the fifth country in the world, to have landed spacecraft on the moon. The team presented a model of the tiny space vehicle at a meeting of the Knesset Science and Technology Committee’s subcommittee on space.

Israeli student Tirosh Shapira has become the first person to meld his mind and movements with a robot surrogate, or avatar. Situated inside an fMRI scanner in Israel, he controlled a humanoid robot 2000 kilometers away, in France, using just his mind.

Technion’s annual “Technobrain” challenge was for teams to use their technical skills to simulate the 1912 planting of the Institute’s cornerstone. But this time, from a great height.

SDE Energy Ltd., an Israeli marine- technology developer, is in talks with Ecuador’s Ministry of Electricity and Renewable Energy to develop several clean energy projects. SDE’s power plants use ocean swells to produce hydraulic pressure, which is then transformed into electricity.

60km north of Eilat, Kibbutz Yahel, part of the Renewable Energy Company, has recently become the first solar kibbutz in Israel. Residents of the kibbutz will be economically secure as a result of the process, since they will benefit from monthly returns.