About Us
Founded in 1944, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science develops philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and advances its mission of science for the benefit of humanity.
Mar 28, 2019...
LOS ANGELES (March 28, 2019) —XPRIZE, the global leader in designing and operating world-changing incentive competitions, announces that it will offer a $1 million Moonshot Award in recognition of an XPRIZE team demonstrating the achievement of a “moonshot” technological feat outside the parameters or timeframe of an XPRIZE competition.
The Award is inspired by SpaceIL, a former Google Lunar XPRIZE team, whose mission to become the first private, non-government entity to land on the surface of the Moon is underway, with an anticipated landing on April 11, 2019. A successful lunar landing will result in SpaceIL receiving the inaugural Moonshot Award from XPRIZE.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/astronomers-witness-biggest-star-explosion/
Dec 01, 2009...
Astronomers have watched the violent death of what was probably the most massive star ever detected. The supernova explosion, which lasted for months, is thought to have generated more than 50 Suns' worth (1032 kilograms) of different elements, which may one day go on to make new solar systems.
The explosion — dubbed SN2007bi — was spotted as part of a digital survey to hunt for supernovae at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California.
Oct 31, 2017...
An artist’s impression shows two tiny but very dense neutron stars at the point at which they merge and explode as a kilonova. (ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser)
In October, LIGO and its European counterpart, VIRGO, witnessed gravitational waves rippling out from a breathtaking collision between two neutron stars. This unprecedented event looked like yet another triumph for a new kind of astronomy, one that could use gravitational waves to probe some of the universe’s deepest mysteries. But in all the excitement, most people didn’t notice that something had died: a whole group of theories that posit a universe with no dark matter.
Dec 17, 2018...
(l-r) Profs. Ilan Koren, Yoav Schechner, and Klaus Schilling are inventing a new way of imaging clouds
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—December 17, 2018—Ten satellites, each around the size of a shoebox, are slated in a few years to enter orbit and begin filling in some gaping holes in our understanding of clouds and their role in climate. Inspired by medical CT (computed tomography), which observes and maps patients’ interiors, the designers are creating a system that will reveal detailed images of clouds’ external and internal 3D structures and properties. By probing small cloud fields that are generally missed by today’s remote-sensing technologies, the mission may resolve some major uncertainties that limit current atmospheric modelling and climate prediction.
Mar 19, 2019...
Beresheet and its route to the moon. (photo credit: SPACEIL)
A team of scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science and SpaceIL engineers have identified the site for Israel's Beresheet spacecraft's lunar landing.
According to a release disseminated by the Weizmann Institute, the chosen site was selected by Prof. Oded Aharonson of the Weizmann Institute and Prof. Jim Head of Brown University. It is located in the northeastern part of Mare Serenitatis, a few hundreds of miles east of the Apollo 15 landing site and a similar distance northwest from the Apollo 17 site.
Jul 04, 2012...
Illustration of a particle collision.
The long and complicated journey to detect the Higgs boson, which started with one small step about 25 years ago, might finally have reached its goal. This was reported by Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator scientists on July 4 at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, near Geneva.
Named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, the Higgs boson is the final building block that has been missing from the “Standard Model,” which describes the structure of matter in the universe. The Higgs boson combines two forces of nature and shows that they are, in fact, different aspects of a more fundamental force. The particle is also responsible for the existence of mass in the elementary particles.
Mar 07, 2018...
Jupiter’s cloud bands — seen here in this image created by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran, using data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft — extend more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) into the planet’s interior, three new studies suggest. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran
The colorful stripes of Jupiter run more than 1,000 miles deep and hold so much gas that their mass is about three times that of the entire Earth, three new studies find.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/looking-for-life-in-the-multiverse/
Dec 16, 2009... The typical Hollywood action hero skirts death for a living. Time and again, scores of bad guys shoot at him from multiple directions but miss by a hair. Cars explode just a fraction of a second too late for the fireball to catch him before he finds cover. And friends come to the rescue just before a villain's knife slits his throat. If any one of those things happened just a little differently, the hero would be hasta la vista, baby. Yet even if we have not seen the movie before, something tells us that he will make it to the end in one piece.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/science-tips-august-2014/
Aug 11, 2014... Blood stem cells have the potential to turn into any type of blood cell, whether it be the oxygen-carrying red blood cells, or the immune system’s many types of white blood cells that help fight infection. How exactly is the fate of these stem cells regulated? Preliminary findings from research conducted by scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Hebrew University are starting to reshape the conventional understanding of the way blood stem cell fate decisions are controlled, thanks to a new technique for epigenetic analysis they have developed. Understanding epigenetic mechanisms (environmental influences other than genetics) of cell fate could lead to the deciphering of the molecular mechanisms of many diseases, including immunological disorders, anemia, leukemia, and many more. It also lends strong support to findings that environmental factors and lifestyle play a more prominent role in shaping our destiny than previously realized.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/weizmann-scientists-to-send-atomic-clock-to-jupiter/
Mar 16, 2016...
The Juno space probe near Jupiter. Photo by www.shutterstock.com
An atomic clock – designed and constructed in Israel – will be carried beyond the Earth’s orbit as part of a mission planned by the European Space Agency (ESA).
The ESA mission, known as JUICE – JUpiter ICy moons Explorer – will spend at least three years making detailed observations of the solar system’s largest planet and three of its largest moons. Jupiter is known to have 67 moons.
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