Israel Active

Israel’s twik uses the latest technology to enable online businesses to personalize their websites and enhance their customers’ shopping experience.

Israel’s BioShade (see previously) is helping to make urban areas greener and cooler. Its smart lightweight PVC pipes contain a hydroponic system that helps create green walls, roofs, and pergolas. The plants sprout through holes in the pipes that accommodate their root systems as they grow.

Scientists from Israel’s Weizmann Institute have discovered that soil-beneficial bacteria can help trees survive water scarcity and even flourish in drought conditions. The bacteria promotes tree root secretions that establish a symbiotic relationship between the tree and bacteria.

Israel’s Melodea (see previously) has launched MelOx NGen - a high-performance barrier product that has proven superior in maintaining food freshness and substantially reducing plastic waste. It will also help companies meet the EU Plastic Waste Directive.

Researchers at Israel’s Ariel University have designed a new membrane system for reverse osmosis desalination plants, that filters out unwanted sodium chloride salt but not the beneficial nutrients. Tests of the filtered water in the Arava grew peppers with higher yields and better ripening qualities.

Nine months ago, Israel’s Xfloat (see previously) began implementing its pilot floating solar power farms in northern Israel and has already begun to generate energy commercially. Xfloat believes solar panel growth will eventually move toward the sea, as available land becomes scarcer.

Tel Aviv University scientists have boosted the efficiency of producing hydrogen (a vital fuel) using electrolysis. They used a hydrogel to attach the enzyme hydrogenase to the electrode. It made the process 90% efficient and avoided the current need to employ expensive catalysts such as Platinum.

Curiosity Robotics has created Aico - a friendly, chatty little robot to teach English as a foreign language to preschoolers.  Aico uses the teaching method of UK-Israeli Helen Doron, which advocates for children starting to learn a second language as early as three months of age.

At the International Mathematics Olympiad in Chiba, Japan, Israel’s Itamar Nir won a gold medal. Israelis won five other medals, taking Israel to 14th place of the 112 countries. Israeli students also won five silver medals at the International Physics Olympiad in Tokyo.

The 7 Israeli startups (out of 49) that won the 4-month 2023 MassChallenge Israel accelerator program are: ; McFly (heavy lifting drone); Origametria (teaching geometry); ; RealizeMD (anonymizing faces in medical data); ; and Coda (speech to sign language).