https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/adapting-fly
August 1, 2012
The survival of a species depends in large part on the organisms’ ability to adapt to stressful environmental challenges – for instance, changes in temperature, variations in food supply or pollution. Such adapt...
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/people/poet-science
August 13, 2012
The link between science and morality is a leading theme in Prof. Aharon Katzir’s book In the Crucible of Scientific Revolution, published just months before he was murdered in a terrorist attack at Ben-Gurion Airport 40 years ago. Katzir believed that scienti...
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/switches-stem-cells
August 20, 2012
Stem cells hold great promise for the medicine of the future, but they can also be a cause of disease. When these self-renewing, unspecialized cells fail to differentiate into diverse cell types, they can start dividing uncontrollably, leading to cancer. A Weizmann Insti...
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/earth-sciences/sulfur-swings
August 28, 2012
Sulfur – element 16 in the periodic table – is found all over the Earth. It is released by volcanoes and burning fossil fuels, taken up by living organisms, dissolved in rain and sea water and crystallized in rock. As sulfur cycles through Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and...
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/back-future
August 28, 2012
Time travel is still science fiction. But several years ago, Japanese scientists managed to send human cells back in time, to a very early stage of development. They took adult cells that were differentiated – at the end of their developmental road – and turned...
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/space-physics/through-window-opportunity
September 3, 2012
This summer in London, competitors vied to see who could claim the title of fastest in the world – their speeds often measured down to hundredths of seconds. But for truly record-breaking speed measurements, one needs to look in a modest lab at the end of a b...
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/persistence-memory
September 3, 2012
Traumatic memories can be extremely stubborn. Surfacing again and again – even years after the painful event – they are notoriously difficult to eradicate. Many do succeed – with a lot of behavioral work – to submerge those memories deep in the depths of their brain’s memory...
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/chemistry/spin-doctors
September 13, 2012
If you set a bunch of toy tops spinning closely together, they will collide and stop spinning after a while. But according to the laws of physics, if there are many tops all spinning extremely rapidl...
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/space-physics/thing-and-its-opposite
September 12, 2012
Here is a tangled tale of four research paths that intersected in a surprising way in the Weizmann Institute’s Braun Center for Submicron Research. It combines high drama with subatomic physics, things with their opposites and, above all, the never-ceasing struggle to unders...
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/complexity-and-single-cell
September 12, 2012
No matter how complex, all organisms – from the tiniest fruit fly to a human being – begin with a single cell. We know that this cell contains all the instructions for making every cell type in the body. The challenge is to uncover the overall plan laid out in the instructio...