Israel Active

Over 2000 people viewed PM Netanyahu’s speech prior to the Rio+20 Environmental Summit (featured here last week and on my JPost blog). Please also watch Gilad Erdan - Israel’s Environment Minister – who was elected Vice Chairman of the conference.

Tiny Israel is well known for its outside-the-box thinking, but the cabinet’s approval for new islands is truly ambitious. Plans include a new airport, a seaport, a desalination plant, a power plant and a military testing base that would normally have required valuable coastal land.

Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie credits the media for bringing about Israeli scientific improvements such as teaching science in Hebrew, Israeli Summer Time and “silent” radio to provide an emergency channel to alert the public if necessary during wartime.

Daniel Hillel has won this year’s $250,000 World Food Prize during a ceremony in Washington. Hillel is credited for the development of drip irrigation methods that conserve water while allowing food to be grown in some of the world’s driest climates.

Senior Goldman Sachs strategist Abby Joseph Cohen gave a lecture at Israel’s Technion entitled "Economic Growth and Innovation". She praised Israel’s high-value products and co-operation between Israel and the US, especially with the Technion Cornell University venture in New York.

Apple Inc has again adopted Israeli technology, this time deploying Israeli traffic report navigation app Waze Ltd. as a source for its iOS6 Maps operating system.

Israel’s Mellanox Technologies announced that Intel Corporation has selected the company’s 56 Gbps InfiniBand solution to optimize Intel's I/O Expansion Modules and half-width server boards for high performance applications.

(Thanks to NoCamels) Israeli company Alchemy Research offers a new method to power electric cars by using energy stored in aluminum grains. They have developed a process that produces clean energy from a reaction between aluminum and water. It also can make very efficient electric batteries.

(Thanks to NoCamels) Israeli developers at Microsoft have produced an application called “on{X}” that can detect what is happening and perform automatic actions that you have pre-programmed. Drive or walk somewhere and your Android phone can text someone or suggest something.

Israeli company TIGI Solar was one of three winners in the solar-thermal category at this week's Intersolar Europe Exhibition. TIGI won thanks to its "Honycomb Collector," a new type of solar-thermal technology that uses a transparent insulation mechanism that significantly increases the efficiency of the collector with minimal heat loss, making it suitable for places like northern Europe.