The Technion’s story has been intertwined with Israel’s for more than a century, from laying the foundations for a new nation to shaping its future.
“Nearly all dwellings and buildings require heating and cooling, now more than ever in the face of climate change,” says ThermoTerra. “The increasing use of air conditioners transfers heat from the inside to the outside of buildings, and this in addition to the CO2 emissions resulting from air conditioning energy use only exacerbates the problem.” To address this, the company has developed a cooling and heating technology that avoids CO2 emissions and heating the environment and uses carbon capture materials. Its pilot structure at Ben-Gurion University demonstrated passive cooling continuously to 24°C (75F) solely using water collected from the relatively…
Gal Frenkel built a wooden deck and pool in the backyard of his home in central Israel the summer after he had sold luxury wedding/bar mitzvah event planner Sky Productions (opening price for an event: $1 million). Frenkel hosted a few parties there, and after the summer he didn’t think much about his pool and deck. When he went out to look at it the following spring, he was shocked. “The whole area looked old and ruined and faded. I was so disappointed,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “I called the guy who installed the deck and said, ‘Nadav, you really messed it up.’…
The Technion Honorary Fellowship is given in honor of lifelong devotion and support of the Technion, Israel and education. Franklin residents Cathy and James Deutchman are longtime supporters of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. As a third-generation supporter herself, Cathy Deutchman (née Brody) was preceded by her parents, Rhea and Robert Brody, and her grandparents, Anna and Samuel Brody, as critical supporters of the cutting-edge Israel institution. Now, the Deutchmans have received one of the highest honors awarded by the institution as they were given an Honorary Fellowship at a Technion Board of Directors meeting on June 11 at the…
Evan Jordan can tell when you are stressed, even though he’s never met or interacted with you. An assistant professor of health and wellness design at Indiana University’s School of Public Health-Bloomington, Jordan and his team use GPS tracking to find connections between a person’s environment and their mental health. The data could be stunningly revealing. Why? Because where we are in the world and how much we move is a big indicator of our mental health. Studies suggest that if we take a lot of walks to the park, we’re statistically less likely to have anxiety and depression. If…
Common pedagogical wisdom states that the younger a child begins learning a new language, the easier it is for them to acquire. And adhering to that philosophy, Israeli startup Curiosity Robotics has created a friendly, chatty little robot to teach English as a foreign language to preschoolers. Meet Aico, the charming, smiling artificial intelligence teaching tool that is the product of three years of research at Tel Aviv University’s Curiosity Labs. Aico is programmed to use a teaching method devised by British-Israeli educator Helen Doron, which advocates for children starting to learn a second language as early as three months of age. Curiosity Robotics is a…
An Israeli startup has developed a wearable device that can predict the likelihood of an imminent stroke through changes in the carotid artery’s blood flow, potentially helping early intervention and preventing disablity. Strokes are most commonly caused by a clot blocking the essential supply of blood to the brain, and according to the World Health Organization are the second leading cause of death and the leading cause of disability across the globe. Over 100 million people have experienced a stroke worldwide, with one in four adults experiencing one in their lifetime. And for 50 percent of them, that means some form of…
When serial medical device inventor Dvir Keren became interested in developing a minimally invasive way to fill in bald areas caused by androgenetic alopecia — common in both men and women — he did not realize he’d be establishing a femtech company. But that’s what Hairstetics became, for the simple reason that 85 percent of women with androgenetic alopecia are not benefiting from natural hair transplantation procedures for what is called “male-pattern baldness” in men. “At the beginning, he was thinking about males,” says Hairstetics CEO Oren Ne’eman. “But when recruitment for clinical studies started, a lot of women came.” Keren learned that androgenetic alopecia in…
(Nanowerk News) Refractive index – the ratio of the speed of electromagnetic radiation in a medium to its speed in a vacuum – can be modulated fast enough to generate photonic time crystals (PTCs) in the near-visible part of the spectrum, a new study published in the journal Nanophotonics demonstrates (“Time-refraction optics with single cycle modulation”). The study’s authors suggest that the ability to sustain PTCs in the optical domain could have profound implications for the science of light, enabling truly disruptive applications in the future. PTCs, materials in which refractive index rises and falls rapidly in time, are the…
There are thousands of kinds of bacteria – microscopic, single-celled organisms that are among the earliest known life forms on earth and live in every possible environment all over the world. They might be airborne or found in water, plants, soil, animals and even humans, where some cause dangerous diseases such as salmonella, pneumonia, meningitis, tuberculosis, anthrax, tetanus and botulism. However, many bacteria, including the ones that comprise the human gut microbiome, do good rather than harm. Bacteria can even be turned into tiny factories that manufacture needed products. Now, researchers at the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering at…
The Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation has announced that it has approved $8 million in funding for nine new projects between U.S. and Israeli companies. Alongside grants from BIRD, the projects will access private-sector funding and boost the total investment in all projects to $23 million. As well as conditional grants of up to $1.5 million, the BIRD Foundation assists by working with companies to identify potential strategic partners and facilitate introductions. The submitted projects are reviewed by evaluators appointed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the U.S. Department of Commerce and the…
The weight-loss market is, pun perhaps intended, huge. Recent years have seen the advancement of dieting drugs, but many of these include painful injections and a whole slew of side effects. An Israeli startup, meanwhile, enables people interested in losing a moderate amount of weight to take a pill that leaves them feeling full without drugs. “The idea was to develop a product that can be swallowed through the mouth and which opens up in the stomach to apply pressure on the stomach wall and so produce a feeling of satiety,” Epitomee CEO Dr. Dan Hashimshony tells ISRAEL21c. “That’s something that’s easy…
An emerging field of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology has elevated voice dubbing to a new level—one where English-speaking acting icons can indeed appear to speak their famous lines in fluent Spanish or Greek or even Russian. Voice dubbing is when a new voice replaces the original voice for a role, usually to translate the content into another language and an Israeli startup is leading the way, thanks to its artificial intelligence platform. Traditional voice dubbing studios can take up to months to produce dubbed versions of content, with a complex duplication process that includes finding the right voice actor and…