Israel Active

Shay Yalin has won an international competition looking for "green" cell-phone games. "PET Race" entails having major soft drink companies hold weekly contests focusing on the recycling of bottles. Shay’s idea was featured at the Rio+20 environment summit.

Israel’s youth team for the 2012 International Mathematical Olympiad in Argentina won five medals including three silvers, a bronze and one special citation. It could have been better had the team’s plane not made an emergency landing and arrived in Buenos Aires just hours before the event.

A new National Centre for Mediterranean Research will investigate fossil fuel extraction, desalination and infrastructure of Haifa’s coast.

Israel’s Arothron has developed underwater compressed air energy storage (UWCAES) systems to handle the problem of where to store excess power during low usage periods (e.g. at night). It also deals with energy demands at night when solar energy production is impossible.

Israel’s Leviathan Energy is able to generate electricity at its desert test site using a turbine inside an underground water pipe. The Benkatina Turbine uses excess pressure to produce between 20 and 60 kilowatts of energy, which can either be used locally or fed back into the national grid.

FODetect from Israel’s Xsight uses hybrid radar and electro optical technology to detect junk on runways. The system can prevent incidents such as when an Air France Concorde hit Foreign Object Debris (FOD) from a previous flight, caught fire and crashed, killing 113 people.

Tel Aviv is hosting the first of its kind Israeli Patents Exhibition in September. It intends to put 10,000 Israeli and foreign inventors, investors, patent attorneys, mechanical engineers and computer programmers in the same room and turn good ideas into actual products.

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!