Researchers at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Haifa’s Technion recently made an interesting observation while studying the coral outside the resort city of Eilat. For one half an hour each day, the coral colonies appear to nap. “During the day the coral uses the photosynthesis to generate its food, and during the night it goes through respiration like other animals,” said Uri Shavit, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Technion. “Just before sunset when the level …More

While a great deal of international and media focus has been placed on Israel's military conflicts, the country quietly has become an energetic, ambitious incubator of entrepreneurialism and invention. What follows is a timeline chronicling some of the most important and interesting innovations produced by Israelis during their country's 65-year existence. RUMMIKUB (1940s): Ephraim Hertzano invents the smash hit board game Rummikub, which goes on to become the best-selling game in the United States in 1977. UZI …More

Avner Meyrav, NoCamels - Israel Innovation News Diagnosing stomach cancer is not an easy task. It normally involves unpleasant procedures and sometimes full anesthesia. Israeli, Chinese and Latvian researchers may now have found a way to reduce the stress of complicated procedures, by developing a test that can “sniff out” stomach cancer. The test is based on existing “electronic nose” technology--sensors so accurate, that they can pick up scents that the human nose never could. According …More

Avner Meyrav, NoCamels - Israel Innovation News One of the major causes for blindness in the Western world is degenerative diseases of the outer retina. Such diseases causes the body’s natural light receptors to malfunction and can lead to visual impairment and blindness. Scientists at the Technion have recently developed a method to restore eye sight by projecting holographic images directly on to the retina. In other recent studies, people suffering from such conditions were able to regain some of their …More

Frolicking with her fiance in the cool waters of the Suez Canal, Lilian Abada would never have imagined she was about to experience the first of a string of events that would ultimately lead her to flee her native Egypt for Israel with only one suitcase. When Abada and her future husband, Nisso, emerged from the water that day in 1956, a security agent was waiting for them. The two teenagers were arrested for spying for Israel and interrogated for days. They were released and then rearrested, along with hundreds …More

Paul Sanchez Keighley, NoCamels - Israel Innovation News You know those child geniuses who, instead of brandishing toy-soldiers and erecting Lego fortresses spend their childhood carefully taking electric devices apart, reassembling them and even further befuddling their parents by improving them? Well, Dov Moran wasn’t one of them. Dov Moran is the founder of M-Systems, the company that created the USB Flash Drive (DiskOnKey) and went on to sell it for $1.6 billion to SanDisk; he created modu, which made …More

A crew of Israeli scientists is aiming to make the Jewish state the third nation to land a craft on the moon. Team SpaceIL is currently competing in a global quest set forth by Google, which guarantees a $30 million Lunar X Prize to the next team that successfully lands a robot on the moon and sends imagery back by 2015. Twenty-five teams around the world are currently working on the project, and the Israeli squad said it hopes to donate the winnings to educational pursuits should it take top …More

Israeli scientists are helping develop technology that can predict the future, using archived resource material. Researchers at the Technion University and Microsoft have spent years compiling more than two decades worth of material from the New York Times, Wikipedia, and other agents, using past patterns to predict when and where future calamities might occur. “I truly view this as a foreshadowing of what’s to come ... eventually this kind of work will start to have an influence on how things go for …More

An initiative between Technion University and Cornell launched last week in New York City, concluding more than a year of cooperative planning between the two schools. The Cornell NYC Tech campus is the result of a program put forward by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In 2011, Bloomberg accepted applications from colleges around the word to form a new technology-focused campus in Manhattan, with the hopes of turning the city into a center for tech development. Cornell and Technion were chosen as winning …More

The IDF's female soldiers have long filled positions throughout the entire military spectrum, some of them serving as pilots, intelligence officers, naval officers, and search and rescue workers. In recent years, the opportunities open to women in combat units have grown, including through the establishment of the mixed-gender Caracal Battalion, in which women and men serve together as combat soldiers. The IDF reached a new milestone in 2006, establishing its first company consisting entirely of female combat …More

A new technology pioneered by Israeli scientists offers new hope for women unable to conceive. Doctoral student Ayelet Evron, under the guidance of Dr. Eliezer Shalev, dean of the medical school at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, recently discovered a potential way of replicating human ovum using the placental tissue ordinarily discarded after birth. Until adolescence, the cells that become eggs within women’s ovaries remain undifferentiated germ cells. When a young woman goes through puberty, …More

NoCamels Team, NoCamels - Israeli Innovation News People who suffer from breathing disorders such as sleep apnea are usually at higher risk for cardiovascular disease. But an intriguing new study from the Technion, Israel’s Institute of technology, suggests that some people who have already suffered heart attacks may actually benefit from mild to moderate sleep-disordered breathing following their attack. Apnea and other types of sleep-disordered breathing can boost the numbers and functions of rare cells …More