Alexandra Cousteau en Israël

"From the Ganges River, the spiritual heart of India, to the Mississippi River in America, legendary marine scientist and explorer Jacques Cousteau's granddaughter is collecting stories about water. She's not reporting on new technologies that promise to save the world, or on politics, or the regular environmental doom and gloom. [...]

After arriving from South Africa, she enters a fresh entry in her blog: "The reason we're at Kibbutz Ketura is to visit the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a remarkable non-profit organization who makes its home here," she writes. "Arava brings Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians together with students from around the world to study environmental issues".

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Source: article Karin Kloosterman @ ISRAEL21c

Enumération globulaire sur une goutte de sang

La société FocuCell, issue de technologies et d’inventions au sein du Technion a présenté à Paris son dernier développement: la création d’un appareil portable permettant de faire en moins de deux minutes une énumération globulaire sur une goutte de sang.
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Source: Israel Valley

Le "Prix Nobel arabe" remis à un ex-chercheur de l'Institut Weizman

"En sciences et en médecine, il faut aller loin pour ne pas choisir de juif." C’est en ces termes que le Pr Ronald Levy, chef de la division d’Oncologie de l’Université de Stanford s’est exprimé à la presse.

C’est aujourd’hui chose faite, Ronald Levy, un scientifique juif américain de la prestigieuse Université de Stanford, s’est vu décerner le précieux sésame de la Fondation du Roi Fayçal d’Arabie Saoudite.

Un prix qui vient récompenser un travail de longue haleine, 30 années de recherche consacrées à un programme destiné à exploiter le pouvoir du système immunitaire de l’organisme à combattre le cancer.
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Source: article de Yoni Abittan @ Israel Valley

Israeli find could cure deafness

An Israeli discovery on the function of tiny molecules called microRNAs (miRNAs) in the inner ears of mice could lead to the cure of human deafness in adults caused by aging, disease, drugs and noise, or genetic disease in children.

The research, carried out over three years by world-renowned geneticist Prof. Karen Avraham [photo] of Tel Aviv University's Sackler School of Medicine and Dr. Lilach Friedman and other post-doctoral researchers in her lab, has just been released for publication in the prestigious journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America).

About one out of every two elderly people suffers from some degree of hearing disability, while one in 1,000 infants is born deaf due to mutant genes. Healthy babies are born with 15,000 sensory hair cells in each ear that allow them to hear. These hair cells are responsible for translating sounds to electrical pulses that the brain can interpret.
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Source: article de Judy Siegel-Itzkovich @ TJP

- Holding out hope of a cure for deafness (ISRAEL21c)

Health Scan: HU deepens our understanding of brain function

A new analytical tool showing how our brains record outside stimuli and react to them has been developed by a team of Hebrew University scientists. Although much progress has been made in recent decades in understanding the brain, scientists still know relatively little about how it functions. The two key problems are that there will never be enough real data from measuring what the brain actually does, and even if there were, there haven't been enough methods for analyzing such data to reveal how neural coding takes place.

The analytical method developed at Hebrew University should be able to provide an indication, for example, of how many neurons encode a given stimulus such as reactions to a face or movement, and how they collaborate to do it.

Current technology allows researchers only a very partial view of brain activity. For example, we can't record the activity of more than a few hundred nerve cells from the cortex of an animal carrying out a task. Methods like MRI can map larger brain areas, but cannot measure single neurons. What can one learn from such a partial view?
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Source: Article de Judy Siegel-Itzkovich @ TJP