Shedding Light on the Dark Hours
Why do asthma, heart attacks and many other health conditions tend to strike in the early hours of the morning? One possible explanation for this mysterious phenomenon has been discovered by researchers from Prof. Gad Asher’s laboratory at the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Biomolecular Science…
Grabbing a Model by the Throat
The throat of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans might seem like an odd place for exploring the complexity of life’s mechanisms, until one realizes how much information has been collected on these tiny nematodes over the past several decades. This wealth of data was a major reason the worm was…
“Eight Shining Examples of Excellence”
“Science for Life” – after a year fraught with challenges and tragedy, this is the title of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s 76th International Board Annual General Meeting. This title highlights both the crucial role that basic research plays in safeguarding all forms of life and the Weizman…
Burning Cancer’s Bridges
“Build your enemy a golden bridge to retreat across” is a piece of advice offered by Sun Tzu in his ancient military treatise, The Art of War. It turns out that cancerous growths adopt this strategy in their battle against the immune system. In a new study being published in Cell Reports, resear…
Crystalizing Our Comprehension of Malaria
Prof. Leslie Leiserowitz first became intrigued by malaria when he was a young boy in South Africa. His father, who scouted the continent in search of wood for the family business, brought back not only tales of elephants and gorillas but also skin rashes and ringing in his ears, side effects of…
Unclogging the Immune System
Whenever a sink overflows, the flooding is usually caused by a blockage that has built up in the drains. Similarly, as we age our bodies are flooded by aging, or senescent, cells, which have stopped dividing but, instead of dying, remain active and build up in body tissues. Recent studies have s…
Improving the Recipe for Gene Therapy
Gregory and Deborah Macres from California lost their son, Gregory, in 1997, when he was just 4 years old. Little Gregory had a severe form of a rare genetic disorder called Gaucher disease and died after unsuccessful experimental treatment. Despite their personal loss, the Macreses did not aban…
Uncrackable: Scorpions and Sponges Inspire Sustainable Design
Humans are by no means alone in the search for more sustainable materials. Nature, too, has been “working” on the problem of sustainability, and it’s been at it for a great deal longer. In a new study, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science show how design tricks employed by ancient cr…
Hunting Down Giant Viruses That Attack Tiny Algae
They were said to come from outer space, and there were even claims that they were actually bacteria and that they undermined the very definition of viruses. Giant viruses, nicknamed “giruses,” contain enormous quantities of genetic material – up to 100 times more than other viruses – and some a…
Couples Therapy
Like people, bacteria have their preferences when it comes to relationships. Some are totally independent, while others prefer company. Salmonella and many other kinds of bacteria are of the social type: They can live and even thrive inside a host cell. But unlike us, these bacteria do not spend…
A Secret Recipe for Colorful and Versatile Animal Crystals
What do fish, chameleons, crabs and Walter White, the chemistry teacher from Breaking Bad, all have in common? The answer is that they all know how to make crystals. But, unlike the incorrigible White, who manufactured mind-altering methamphetamine crystals for criminal ends, the others make nat…
Stormy Findings and Hot Discoveries
The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record and, unfortunately, this came as no surprise. Summers have been getting hotter and drier around the world, including in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to intense droughts and heatwaves in North America and Europe and posing serious risks to society …
Into the Light
Photosynthesis, the process by which plants, algae and certain kinds of bacteria convert solar radiation into chemical energy, must adjust itself to changes in the intensity of sunlight, so as to ensure its efficient use. Just like our pupils, which react to varying degrees of light exposure wit…
“You Are Our Hope!”
“Within all the chaos that surrounds us, there is a bubble in which a small group of talented students can chase their wildest ideas, ask the most fundamental questions and develop technologies that just yesterday were considered a dream. In recent years, we were sometimes worried that this bubb…
Both Faster and Stronger
Cellular immunotherapy, a leading form of cancer treatment, enlists the “warriors” of our immune system, our T-cells, in the war on cancer. During preparations for the treatment, doctors take a sample of T-cells from the patient and activate them to make them divide rapidly and form a massive ar…
Plastic Fantastic: Green, Strong and Edible
Billions of tons of plastic waste clutter our world. Most of it has accumulated on the ground and in the oceans or disintegrated into tiny particles known as microplastics that pollute the air and the water, penetrating vegetation and the bloodstreams of humans and other animals. The scope of th…
New Circuit Made of DNA Has Everything Wired In
Weizmann Institute of Science researchers were thrilled when they managed to observe the birth of a protein made by a single DNA molecule: No one had previously seen this event outside a cell. That excitement, however, was only the beginning. The insights from the observation enabled the scienti…
Peeling Back the Layers of Brain Tumors
The cells that make up cancerous brain tumors are extremely varied and sometimes create unique three-dimensional shapes. As far back as 1932, American neurosurgeon Percival Bailey attempted to label these cells and discovered that they can be divided into several families of cells with similar p…
The Weizmann Institute of Science Ranked among the World’s Top Ten Academic Institutions
The Weizmann Institute of Science maintains its status as one of the world’s leading research institutions. It has recently been placed in the top ten among universities worldwide in a weighted (proportional) ranking of research quality published annually by the Centre for Science and …
A Discovery to Set Your Heart a-Knocking
In the late 1960s, three Weizmann Institute of Science researchers developed several protein-like molecules, called copolymers, that they believed would produce a disease similar to multiple sclerosis in laboratory animals. The scientists – Prof. Michael Sela, Prof. Ruth Arnon and Dr. Dvora Teit…
Surprising New Material Gets the Lead Out
The ceramic produced in Prof. Igor Lubomirsky’s lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science seemed too good to be true. It belongs to a class of materials that are the backbone of many essential technologies but that unfortunately also create an environmental problem because they usually contain le…
When an Ion Met an Atom
When two particles collide, they normally fly off in opposite directions, like billiard balls on a smooth table. But in a recent physics experiment at the Weizmann Institute of Science, instead of flying off, the particles seemed to engage in a sort of a post-collision billiard-ball ballet. The …
Cactus Dreams: Revealing the Secrets of Mescaline Making
Mescaline, a natural hallucinogen known since ancient times, was not only a favorite of artists and bohemians but also a mainstay of brain research throughout the first half of the 20th century, until it was eclipsed in the 1950s by the much more potent, synthetic LSD. Now, with the resurgence o…
Navigating the Digestive Tract
Tourists visiting an unfamiliar city would have a hard time finding their way around if they were using nothing but a topological map, no matter how detailed. Most tourist maps, therefore, highlight sights of interest and prominent landmarks. As far back as the 16th century, we were mapping out …
Finding Immune Cells under Our Very Noses
The nose is a major gateway to our bodies – for the air we breathe, the aromas we smell and the microbes that make us sick. On its way in, the air passes through nasal conchae, or turbinates – the long, narrow, curled shelves of bone that look like a shell and protrude into the breathing passage…
Catch a Virus by Its Tail
Phages, viruses that attack bacteria, have a head and a tail. The head contains the phage’s genetic material and the tail is used to identify a potential host, that is, a bacterial cell into which it can inject this material. Once the injection is complete, the phage hijacks the bacterium’s cell…
Sperm Welcome – But Their Mitochondria Must Go
Within minutes of fertilization, the egg of a fruit fly becomes a scene from the battle of the sexes. The egg attacks and destroys the cellular “power plants,” or mitochondria, from the sperm that had fertilized it, so that only its own mitochondria remain. These findings from a new Weizmann Ins…
Sticking a Pin in Cancer
“Who will watch the watchers?” asked Roman poet Juvenal way back in the first century C.E. Nature has been addressing that very question for much, much longer. The human body contains proteins that are designed to protect us from cancerous growths. Like most proteins, to do their job properly, t…
A Sweet New MRI Method “Lights Up” Pancreatic Cancer
Pancreatic cancer is difficult to detect, in part because the pancreas sits deep in the abdominal cavity in a position that can vary from person to person; pancreatic tumors therefore can remain hidden until too late for treatment. Now, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have demon…
Reimaging Images
Just a few years ago, we could hardly have imagined that millions of people around the world would have access to easy-to-use generative AI applications that produce texts, images and videos. These apps can generate outputs that look as if they were created by human beings, as well as create thi…
The Constant Gardener
Like treetops reaching high into the sky to sense the sunlight, our sensory neurons – whose role is to collect information about what is happening in and around the body – grow long, intricate extensions known as axons. These extensions spread out throughout the body, conveying various sensation…
When the Light Particle Saw the Light
Vortices are a common physical phenomenon. You find them in the structure of galaxies, tornadoes and hurricanes, as well as in a cup of tea, or water as it drains from the bathtub. Normally, vortices are formed when very fast-flowing air, water or another substance encounters an area with a slow…
Mouths Wide Shut: How Cellular Cleaning Out Is Kept in Check
Autophagy, which literally means “self-eating,” is a cellular cleaning-out process that maintains our bodies in good order, but excessive autophagy can be too much of a good thing. Now Weizmann Institute of Science researchers have revealed a dietary control device – one that keeps the mouth of …
From Tip to Tail
Once upon a time, we were all nothing but a mass of densely packed stem cells. Over time, this mass elongated, sprouted limbs on either side, buttocks at the rear, a stomach in the front and a head on the top. The process by which embryonic stem cells give rise to distinct organs, rescuing us fr…
Bacteria against Mutants
For the size of any population to remain stable over time, its birth and death rates must be balanced. If the birthrate is too high, there could be a population explosion; if it is too low, the population will shrink. This kind of balance exists, for example, among the 10,000 billion or so cells…
“In a Word: Democracy”
I want to thank the Weizmann Institute of Science for having me here. It is an honor to receive this recognition. To be here in Israel at this moment feels like a moral duty.
Israel’s existence as a Jewish state remains nothing short of a modern miracle. I was born in a country where “Jew” was …
Excellence, Resilience and Diligence: Meet the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Honorary PhD Recipients
A sociologist of education, a geneticist of skin cells, a chess grandmaster, a founder of Israel’s pharma industry and a couple who are scientists and philanthropists – these are the six recipients of honorary Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the Weizmann Institute of Science for 2023, bestowed…
Beating the Plateau
Jerusalem has been inhabited continuously for thousands of years, serving as both a center of religious significance and a seat of power for kingdoms, yet despite the vast number of historical texts about the city, there are still gaps in its absolute chronology. Researchers from the Weizmann In…
Association of University Heads, Israel: Statement on Violent Demonstrations and Antisemitism on US Campuses – April 2024
We, the presidents of the research universities in Israel, express our deep concern over the recent surge of severe violence, antisemitism, and anti-Israel sentiment across numerous leading universities in the United States. These disturbing events are often organized and supported by Palestinia…
Fish under the Influence Reveal How Psychedelics Work
Psychedelics are a hot topic in labs all over the world because they hold great potential for relieving the symptoms of depression, anxiety, PTSD and other mood-related conditions. Still, there is a major hurdle to developing these substances into safe, effective medications: Very little is know…
Shaping the Role of Future Physician-Scientists
The Weizmann Institute of Science, in a joint initiative with the Miriam and Aaron Gutwirth Fund, is set to establish a medical school, through which it will launch a unique program to train the next generation of physician-scientists. The program, which will be open to graduates and postgraduat…
AI Flexes Its Muscles
Life sciences have never been more digital. To learn more about life processes, biologists are collecting massive quantities of data that computer scientists analyze by means of sophisticated computational models that they develop. Over the past few years, Dr. Ori Avinoam of the Biomolecular Sci…
Social Hierarchy: Even for Mice, It’s Complicated
For animals, including humans, one’s place in the social hierarchy can affect everything, including one’s health and lifespan. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have now used a naturalistic approach to studying how mice form social hierarchies, and they discovered something unexpe…
A Hundred Million Suns: The Most Complete Portrait of a Supernova
Humankind has long turned to the skies in search of answers. Accounts of supernovae – exploding stars – go back thousands of years, but while we know today that these events create the building blocks of life itself, the conditions that cause a star to explode still remain very much a mystery. R…
Fungus vs. Fungus: Newly Identified Yeast Might Prevent Life-Threatening Fungal Infections
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have identified a yeast that might be used to prevent invasive candidiasis, a major cause of death in hospitalized and immunocompromised patients. The study, published today in the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), shows that the novel yeast…
How Does a Bacterium Know It’s Time?
Bacterial cells do not wake up one morning and decide to become parents. But there is a point in their cell cycle – after growing sufficiently and replicating their genomes – when they split in two, creating new cells that then repeat the process. What tells the bacterium that it’s time to split…
Toward a Treatment for Huntington’s Disease
The human brain is a well-guarded control center. Its system of blood vessels is surrounded by a densely packed cellular barrier that prevents most substances from getting in or out. This fortified architecture protects the brain, but it can also stop it from getting help when it needs it – for …
Proteins without Parents
When Profs. Joel Sussman and Israel Silman were asked to mentor Chinese students online during the COVID-19 pandemic, the last thing they expected to come out of the experience was highly innovative research on protein evolution that could change our understanding of the way new proteins come in…
Down the Rabbit Hole
No one would ever confuse a human being with, say, a mouse or a chicken. But at the very start of their different developmental paths, they share a striking similarity. In fact, even the most experienced researchers have a hard time saying whether an embryo in its gastrulation stage – one of the…
There’s a New Hypothesis on Your Hypophysis
An unexpected observation has led researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science to challenge a 200-year-old doctrine regarding the embryonic origins of the pituitary gland.
Situated at the base of the brain, this pea-sized organ, also known as the hypophysis, plays a central role in maintaini…
The Human Touch: Designing “Humanized” Antibodies That Work
In the late nineteenth century, physicians started treating human disease with blood serum extracted from immunized horses. But those extracts – which contained antibodies that target disease agents – often produced disastrous immunological responses. In the late twentieth century, researchers p…
Standing United: When Immune Cells Join Forces, Cancer Therapy Is More Effective
Winning on the battlefield takes a combination of precise intelligence and resolute soldiers. But when it comes to the battle against cancer, the immune system’s fighters – the T cells – quickly lose their ability to kill and become exhausted, while the intelligence-providing dendritic cells are…
Local Heroes
As they have done over the past decade, Prof. Avraham Levy and Naomi Avivi-Ragolsky of the Weizmann Institute of Science planned to conduct a field experiment with wheat this year at the Gilat experimental station, the southern branch of the Agricultural Research Organization of Israel’s Ministr…
Evolutionary Safety First
How many mutations do I, or any member of my species, need to improve our chances of survival? There is no single correct answer to that question, but one might think about it in terms of the inherent tension between innovation and conservation. If the mutation rate is high – that is, if more er…