From AFP:

Israel’s contribution to the world of scientific research has won it a growing number of accolades, with the Jewish state turning out an impressive number of achievements relative to its size.

Israeli professor Dan Shechtman on Wednesday became the tenth Israeli to become a Nobel laureate when he won the prize for chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals, which overturned scientific theory on the nature of solids.

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Over the past 45 years, Israel has won a total of 10 Nobel prizes — a major achievement for a country of just 7.8 million people.

Four have been in the field of chemistry, two were for economic sciences; one was awarded for literature while three Israelis have won the Nobel Peace prize, including Peres.

Israel is the country which counts the most engineers per head and ranks second only to the United States in the number of companies listed on Nasdaq.

Almost all the big names in technology — from Intel and Google to Microsoft — have important research and development centres in Israel, and there are 500 new start-ups every year.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, it seems as though this animated short I created last year is as relevant as ever.

Israel is the only country in the world to include genetic testing in its basket of health services, according to Ben- Gurion University of the Negev president Rivka Carmi.

She said this move followed research in which she showed that such tests can reduce child mortality in Beduin children.

Carmi, a physician, geneticist and pediatrician who previously was dean of BGU’s health sciences faculty, said at a science gathering in Tel Aviv on Wednesday that early diagnosis of severe genetic disease has been very beneficial to the Beduin community in the Negev.

Her lecture kicked off a series of talks at the Dov Yudkovsky Center in Beit Sokolov, home of the Tel Aviv Journalists Association, and was the latest in its “Science Cafe” series of BGU public lectures launched last year. So far, 30 BGU faculty members have taken part.

Carmi’s study concentrated on the clinical and molecular characteristics of inherited diseases in the Negev’s Beduin population, and included over 100 scientific articles, including one that described 12 new genes and three new genetic syndromes (including one named for Carmi). She and her research team have in recent years discovered phenomena unique to the Negev community that result from inbreeding through the marriage of cousins, including the lack of a growth hormone that causes abnormal height, as well as deafness and rare genetic disorders.

Her speech aroused much interest among the standingroom- only audience of journalists, who asked her many questions about her research.

Unless you believe we are keeping them alive only so we can harvest their organs.

With fewer fish in the sea with each passing year, Israel’s Grow Fish Anywhere has found a way to grow them in the desert.

“There’s plenty of fish in the sea,” the old saying goes – but that’s not as true as it once was. In fact, says Dotan Bar-Noy, CEO of Israel’s GFA (Grow Fish Anywhere) Advanced Systems, there are fewer fish in the sea with each passing year. “Overfishing is a much bigger problem than people realize, and in a few years, many species of salt water fish are simply going to disappear if something isn’t done.”

Bar-Noy and 30 or so others – mostly engineers, marine biologists and other technical folk – have found a solution to the diminishing numbers of fish in the sea. Based on the work of Israeli scientist Dr. Yossi Tal and Hebrew University professor Jaap van Rijn – inventor of the system – GFA has developed an on-land environment where fish can be raised, without having to exchange water or treat it chemically.

“We call this a zero-discharge system,” Bar-Noy tells ISRAEL21c. “We use biological filters and specially developed bacteria to treat the water the fish are growing in, without wasting anything. The system can be set up to raise salt-water fish anywhere in the world – even in the desert, thousands of miles from the ocean,” he asserts.

Fish farms are nothing new. They’ve been around for years, enabling growers to set up controlled environments that can ensure a specific yield of fish, allowing them to guarantee delivery without worrying about dwindling supplies in the ocean, pollution, inclement weather, and other factors that are hard to control.

Fish farm foibles

Still, while they enhance the conservation of fish in the sea, fish farms have problems of their own – mostly due to the need to circulate the water in the pools and tanks where the fish are raised. Most fish farms are located adjacent to a body of water, and their waste-laden water is channeled into the sea, and replaced with “fresh” sea water.

While fish raised in captivity don’t produce an increased amount of waste, at sea it would be dissipated over a much wider area. The fish waste, with its nitrogen and other elements concentrated in a relatively small area, renders the water that it’s dumped into uninhabitable for fish.

As the tanks are generally located near the shore, in relatively shallow water, the wastewater tends to linger there. With the movement of the currents, nearby jurisdictions are liable to find a considerable number of fish floating belly-up in their bays and harbors, having been poisoned by the high concentration of nitrogen and nutrients in the wastewater dumped from the tanks.

This problem is so serious that in some areas fish farms are banned, despite their being perhaps the only technologically feasible solution available to combat overfishing, says Bar-Noy. Alternative purification systems are based on electrical treatment systems which are expensive to install and run, and are not all that effective, he notes. “Even when they work, the electrical purification systems are too expensive, and fish produced with those systems will cost far more than fish from the sea.”

GFA is currently the only solution that eliminates the environmental problems associated with fish farming. Tanks are filled with water, then with fish – and added to the mix are microbes perfected by GFA to treat the nitrogen and organic waste byproducts of fish production, in the tank.

Water is only added to replace that which evaporates, and the fish can grow through their natural cycle and remain in the tank until they are ready for market. “It’s the most efficient fish growing system possible,” claims Bar-Noy, “There is no pollution, and there is no need to fish at sea. Just set up tanks with GFA technology anywhere in the world, and harvest the fish when you’re ready to go to market.”

Toward eliminating world hunger

Because the GFA system uses cheap and easy-to-produce bacteria to cleanse fish tanks, the costs for raising the fish are fully competitive with those for raising fish from the sea, or other farms, Bar-Noy points out. And tank-raised fish are uniformly tasty. “Fish from the sea are subject to the natural weather cycles of cold and heat, while farmed fish can be raised at a constant, ideal temperature. GFA fish have an even greater advantage, since the water they grow in is always fresh, making the fish taste better than fish from other sources.”

The system has already been set up in several locations in Israel, and the company runs a purification facility in upstate New York, which has been operating since 2009. The facility, the largest using GFA technology, produced about 100 tons of fish last year – mostly salt-water fish like sea bream, bass, tilapia, and others.

GFA is currently working on the third generation of its purification system. While the company was formed in 2008, its technology was developed over a 20-year period. “While the ideas were there for awhile, the only viable purification techniques were based on electrical devices. It was only with the rise of biotechnology techniques that we were able to develop the bacteria that enable us to do the purification cheaply,” Bar-Noy explains.

The resulting system allows for high-capacity fish production – as much as 100 kg of fish per cubic meter of water (220 pounds of fish per 35 cubic feet) – along with the ability to grow fish in any environment. Fish farms can be set up anywhere – including in large cities, where fish may be brought to market the same day they’re harvested, thus enabling growers to eliminate transportation time and costs.

After raising funds from several angels, GFA recently raised NIS 18 million (about $126,000) from Dutch private equity fund Linnaeus Capital Partners. The money will finance a number of projects, including expanding the New York facility and further refining the technology.

“As populations grow, more countries are looking to fish as sources of protein, but overfishing threatens to destroy that dream,” says Bar-Noy. “With our system, fish can be grown anywhere – even in the desert – with minimal environmental impact. This is about more than just growing fish,” he adds. “This could help feed millions.”

Of course, we all know this is just a front for our new Zionist Death Fish^TM project, the purpose of which is to breed more fish, train them to attack Arabs and Muslims, slap GPS devices on them and then let them do their thing.

Quick! Somebody call UNRWA.

“‘Sprouts can cause bouts of flatulence in animals and humans. But I don’t think any of us were prepared for a smell that strong.”

- Michael Riozzi of Chessington Zoo in Surrey, after the zoo apologized to visitors for the stench coming from a gorilla enclosure after feeding the animals sprouts.

Scientists in Israel have discovered a new way to test for water pollution by “listening” to what the plants growing in water have to say.

By shining a laser beam on the tiny pieces of algae floating in the water, the researchers said they hear sound waves that tell them the type and amount of contamination in the water.

“It is a red light, telling us that something is beginning to go wrong with the quality of water,” said Zvy Dubinsky, an aquatic biologist at Israel’s Bar Ilan University. “Algae is the first thing to be affected by a change in water quality.”

And you know what they say in Israel: 2 plants, 3 opinions.

Photo courtesy of the Khaleej Times.

It’s not easy to locate Camero’s offices in the Kfar Neter industrial zone, but it may have just gotten easier. The startup has developed a system that allows users to see through walls.

It sounds just like a comic book fantasy come true – after all, who hasn’t dreamt of getting to peek into the boss’s office or the spouse’s doings in the other room? Not so fast, budding Poirots: Camero’s product is designed not for the entertainment of our inner child, but for use primarily in military and search and rescue operations.

And such technology could indeed be beneficial for special unit soldiers, for instance, or for locating people trapped in burning buildings.

“The idea of seeing through walls has been around since the 1960s, but modern technology is now ripe enough to enable it to happen,” explains Camero’s technology director, Amir Beeri. “When we established the company in 2004, we intended to develop sufficiently high vision resolution to allow an untrained user to see through a wall.”

Camero’s unique radar utilizes Ultra Wide Band (UWB), a technology that has only come of age in recent years, and with the use of special algorithms can process data picked up by the detector to give a reasonable image of anything behind that wall. Lacking imaging algorithms, the system made by its competitor, Time Domain is able to reveal only whether there is someone on the other side of the wall.

Although the first version developed by Camero, the Xaver 800, which includes a 82cm by 82cm screen on a tripod and weighs about 10 kg, making the system too clumsy for use in battle conditions, the Xaver 400 and Xaver 300 are both lighter weight and smaller sized, meant for use as a quick-to-use tactical tool.

The systems are capable of penetrating various types of walls, but not solid metal ones, like the walls of shipping containers.

Camero CEO Aharon Aharon says that the company has already sold the system to various armies and police forces around the world, and is optimistic about the future of the technology.

“Like the Israeli army’s night vision system, which was once an expensive product and eventually came into broad, general use, we hope that our radar too will become standard issue for all military units,” Aharon said.

Now that we have something that creates transparent walls, will someone please invent something that creates transparent government?

Update: A video showing the invention (hat tip: Shy Guy)

Palestinian militants are using Google Earth to help plan their attacks on the Israeli military and other targets, the Guardian has learned.

Members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with the Fatah political party, say they use the popular internet mapping tool to help determine their targets for rocket strikes.

“We obtain the details from Google Earth and check them against our maps of the city centre and sensitive areas,” Khaled Jaabari, the group’s commander in Gaza who is known as Abu Walid, told the Guardian.

Abu Walid showed the Guardian an aerial image of the Israeli town of Sderot on his computer to demonstrate how his group searches for targets.

The Guardian filmed an al-Aqsa test rocket launch, fired into an uninhabited area of the Negev desert, last month. Despite the crudeness of the weapons, many have landed in Sderot, killing around a dozen people in the last three years and wounding scores more.

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Abu Walid insists there is no contradiction between his group’s actions and talk of peace by Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah’s leader.

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When asked about the use of Google Earth by al-Aqsa militants, Google said it was aware of potential problems, but would not comment specifically on the case. “We have paid close attention to concerns that Google Earth creates new security risks,” said the company in a statement. “The imagery visible on Google Earth and Google Maps is not unique: commercial high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery of every country in the world is widely available from numerous sources. Indeed, anyone who flies above or drives by a piece of property can obtain similar information.”

The company would not confirm whether it had received requests from the Israeli government to block certain images or areas inside Google Earth, but said it was committed to working with officials to take public safety into account.

“Google has engaged, and will continue to engage, in substantive dialogue with recognised security experts and relevant agencies worldwide,” it said.

I’m hoping that this is not just Google paying lip service. Especially if they’re serious about commandment #6.

Scientists say conclusive data shows there is no question circumcision reduces men’s chances of catching HIV by up to 60 percent ‚Äî a finding experts are hailing as a major breakthrough in the fight against AIDS. The question now is how to put that fact to work to combat AIDS across Africa.

The findings first were announced in December, when initial results from two major trials — in Kenya and Uganda — showed promising links between circumcision and HIV transmission. However, those trials were deemed so definitive that the tests were halted early.

The full data from the trials, carried out by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, were published Friday in The Lancet.

More proof that G-d has a sense of humor:

“This is an extraordinary development,” said Dr. Kevin de Cock, director of the World Health Organization’s AIDS department. “Circumcision is the most potent intervention in HIV prevention that has been described.”