jhalper
Posts by this author
July 18, 2010
Anne Dillard said "You can't test courage cautiously," but Institute scientists have found a way to test it fairly safely, at least.
One might think of courage as an abstract idea, but it turns out that acts of bravery reveal a unique activity pattern in the brain. An experiment at the Institute…
July 14, 2010
Bats may be using an innate understanding of physics to track their prey in the dark. Institute neurobiologists trained Egyptian fruit bats to fly to food in a dark lab. They found that in some situations the bats sweep their sonar to either side, catching their "prey" on the beam's slope, while at…
July 6, 2010
In the three years since he joined the Weizmann Institute, there have been four press releases on Dr. Avishay Gal-Yam's work as well a number of stories in our magazines. This may be somewhat unusual, but there is no denying the interest in his subject matter: supernovae.
Of the last two papers…
July 1, 2010
TThe Institute's Prof. Ruth Arnon was elected President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and the Humanities (IASH) last week - the first woman ever elected to the post. We spoke with her briefly:
You have held a number of leadership positions over the years. How is this one different?
My previous…
June 30, 2010
According to the yearly survey in The Scientist, the Weizmann Institute is the second best place to work in international academia. Over the past few years, the Institute has twice taken the number one slot; this is the third time it has been rated number two. Congratulations to the University of…
June 28, 2010
Professor Daniel Zajfman, president of the Weizmann Institute of Science, is a physicist in the fields of atomic and molecular physics. He has a strong interest in the popularization of science
George Mallory, the man who almost made it to the top of Everest, is probably most famous for his terse…
June 14, 2010
For us at the Weizmann Institute of Science, joining the Scienceblogs site is something of an experiment: a blog for a whole institute. As we envision it, there will be several kinds of contributors. The Institute's leadership will add their thought-provoking views about science, both at the…