Formation flying mini satellites under development at the Asher Space Research Institute.

Technion researchers are planning to launch three nano-satellites of up to 6kg each into
space. The project was unveiled to global space agency representatives and space
researchers on January 30, 2012 at the Ilan Ramon International Space Conference of the
Israel Ministry of Science and Technology and the Fisher Institute.

“For the first time ever, an attempt will be made to launch three satellites that will fly
together in a controlled formation. To date, such a launch was not possible due to the size
and weight of the satellites, and because of the problems associated with the launch of
satellites in a uniform formation and their prolonged stay in space”, says Prof. Pini Gurfil of
the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering and the Asher Space Research Institute.

The Technion researchers aim the launch the experimental trio in 2015. The satellites will
attempt to receive signals from Earth at given frequencies, and to calculate the location of
the transmission’s origin. The receiving of signals transmitted from Earth to space using
several nano-satellites flying in formation is an experiment that no man has ventured before.
If it succeeds, formation flying nano satellites can be developed further for applications such
as locating survivors in disaster zones.

Another aim of the experiment is to prove that a uniform, controlled formation of satellites
can be held for one year in a 600 km orbit above Earth. For this purpose, researchers are
planning to install on each of the satellites a propulsion system that will assist in maintaining
the formation in space longer.

The satellites are planned to be built based on a CubeSat standard structure, whose parts will
be assembled by the researchers with the assistance of students. The satellite formation
comprises of six cubes, each 10x10x10 cm, such that each satellite will have a 10x20x30 cm
box. These boxes will carry measuring instruments, antennae, computer systems, control
systems, and navigation instruments. The software and the algorithms that will manage the
flight are developed in the Distributed Space Systems Laboratory at the Technion’s Asher
Space Research Institute and the UAV cluster of the Autonomous Systems Program at the
Technion. The nano-satellite formation will be launched as a supplementary payload on an
existing launch, through Europe, Russia or India.

The ambitious project is based on a prototype that was designed by Prof. Gurfil thanks to a
1.5 million euro grant he received from the European Union. The Technion hopes to get
additional support that will enable the actual development of the micro-satellites and their
launch.

“If we manage to prove in the experiment that the formation flight is possible, this will
provide a momentum to the development of small satellites and technologies related to the
miniaturization of electronic components, to efficient processing in space and to space
propulsion systems. These technologies could contribute to a variety of civil applications and
to the advancement of the Israeli space industry”, says Prof. Gurfil and adds: “another goal
of the project is to contribute to the practical training of space engineers, which is why
undergraduate and graduate students will fill practical roles in the examination of various
aspects related to the mission and in the development of the system. The designated training
and practical experience of space engineers are essential to Israel’s future in this field”.

In July 1998, researchers and students of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the
Technion launched the satellite Gurwin TechSAT 2. The satellite, one of the smallest satellites
of its kind in the world, succeeded in remaining in space and completing all its tasks for
about 12 years.


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“Someone is investing in me, and I will try my hardest to succeed.”

Photo: Atidim.

The award of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Prof. Dan Schechtman, following the 2009 win by Prof. Ada Yonath, put the world of chemistry and Israel’s contributions to science that laypeople can barely understand in the limelight. Schechtman and Yonath have not yet turned their discoveries, of quasi-crystals and the mechanism of the ribosome, respectively, into commercial products, but their two Israeli predecessors, Prof. Aaron Ciechanover and Prof. Avram Hershko, the 2004 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, have succeeded in doing so (or at least trying). They contributed their know-how and reputations to Proteologics Ltd. (TASE: PRTL).

Ubiquitin – the new buzzword

To understand what Proteologics is doing, it is necessary to go back to high school chemistry and the stubborn teacher who tried to explain what a protein is. The company is developing targeted therapeutics for the ubiquitin system, which regulates almost all aspects of eukaryotic cellular function, including cell cycle regulation, DNA repair, signal transduction, immune response, protein quality control and metabolism. The system comprises about 1,000 protiens.
Hershko and Ciechanover discovered the ubiquitin system in 1978, and jointly won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004 for the discovery. They are both members of Proteologics’ science advisory board.
Targeted medications are not regular drugs; as their name implies, they have just one specific target, and are consequently more effective, (improving a patient’s quality of life by reducing the side effects of treatment) and are more efficient for health funds by cutting costs. These drugs discover the proteins that play an important role in a disease, neutralizing which leads to improvement, even a cure, for the disease in question.
A ubiquitin is a small regulatory protein that can be attached to proteins and label them for destruction for the proper function of the cell. Ubiquitin tags can also direct proteins to other locations in the cell, where they control other protein and cell mechanisms. Disruption of the ubiquitin system is therefore liable to cause a wide range of diseases, including cancers, diseases of the nervous system such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, muscular dystrophy, and viral diseases.
Drug development is complicated, and the difficulties are compounded in the case of the ubiquitin system. It is a hierarchal cascade system with three levels: The E1 enzyme is a single protein, which can bind with the subordinate level, E2 enzymes (of which there are about 40), which in turn influence the more than 600 E3 enzymes.
This hierarchal cascade and the multiple E2-E3 connections complicates the drug development task. E3 enzymes directly transfer the signal to the protein, and this is where Proteologics finds the proteins that are the basis for its therapeutics. Any intervention higher up in the hierarchy is liable to cause harm rather than help.
Business model: spread the risk
Proteologics’ business model may prove in future to be much more effective than the models of other R&D companies. The drug development and approval process has three main stages. First is identification of the target and development of a suitable molecule, which is followed by preclinical and human clinical trials.
Proteologics only operates at the first and second stages, while the final stage, which requires more time and financial investment, is handled by the company’s big pharma partners – Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Nasdaq: TEVA; TASE: TEVA) and GlaxoSmithKline plc (NYSE; LSE: GSK).
In this way, Proteologics reduces its financial risk, as the clinical trial and most expensive stage is carried out by big pharma companies which bear the financial risk. Proteologics even receives advances for R&D costs, which are partly covered by its partners. The company also has an option for receiving milestone payments, and will receive generous royalties from sales, assuming that the drug is approved for marketing.
Until that day comes, if it ever does, Proteologics can use the milestone payments to pursue additional projects on the basis of the platform it developed for working with E3 enzymes with different tags. This enables the company to survive, in theory, for a long time as it expands its knowledge and its platform to create a large enough product base that will increase its chances of turning at least one of its drug candidates into a commercial product.
Proteologics CEO Joshua Levin says that it has been able to lower its risk profile by choosing two partners that complements each other, in both character and terms of the agreements signed with them. GlaxoSmithKline, a UK giant with a market cap of $117 billion, is developing with Proteologics six programs for the treatment of various cancers (each program is based on a different E3 enzyme). Teva is jointly developing three programs. Proteologics is also developing two programs independently, and will either continue to do so or find a partner.
“GlaxoSmithKline and Teva complement each other,” says Levin. “Teva is not an innovative company, which is why it chose to invest a little in us now, and give us a larger share of revenue from drug sales. GlaxoSmithKline, in contrast, chose to invest much more in us at the first and second stages, and took a greater share for itself when the drug reaches market.”
In the case of GlaxoSmithKline, which is the more important partner for Levin, each program could generate up to $176 million in royalties, or up to $1 billion altogether, but Levin is realistic about these numbers. “This isn’t a real number. There’s no chance that all six drugs will be commercialized,” he says.

2012 is the critical year

Under Proteologics’ timetable, 2012 will be a critical year. Teva, which has undergone quite a few changes, mainly as a result of its acquisition of Cephalon, is scheduled to receive its first molecule from Proteologics within months, and will have to decide whether it wants to pursue development. If it chooses not to do so, Proteologics can continue development (a Phase I clinical trial) independently, or find another partner, without the need to start the development process from scratch.
Levin is not worried that either Teva or GlaxoSmithKline will return molecules to the company, but he is nonetheless doing everything to make sure that does not happen. In the case of GlaxoSmithKline, each program has a three-year timeframe, which means that in early 2013, Proteologics will have to hand over the first molecule to it and wait for a response.
Read full article at Globes

High-tech Giant Apple to set up Israel development center

With Technion graduates heading R&D centers for Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Intel to name a view, Apple has until now been noticeable by it absence. Now, news is surfacing that Technion graduate (first and second degrees) Aharon Aharon will head Apple’s first ever development center outside of its California headquarters.
Apple Inc. has decided to open a development center in Israel focusing on semiconductors, the first R&D venture for the company outside the United States, the Israeli Business news service Globes Wednesday. The decision was apparently made even before the company entered into talks to acquire Herzliya-based flash storage solutions provider Anobit Ltd.

Apple has hired Aharon Aharon, Technion graduate and a veteran player in Israel’s high tech industry, to lead the new development center. The planned Israel center will be the company’s first such center outside of its California headquarters.

Aharon Aharon comes to Apple with a rich background. His most high-tech venture was Camero Tech Ltd., which develops Radio Frequency (RF) based imaging systems, and which he founded in 2004 with Amir Beeri. Before that, he was chairman of embedded security solutions developer Discretix Inc. and managed their Israel development center. He was also VP operations at Zoran Corp.(Nasdaq: ZRAN), having begun his career at IBM’s Haifa development center where he reached the post of deputy director.

Apple is cultivating it;s new orchard for future growth fast. Aharon will be spending some months at Apple HQ in Cupertino before launching the Israel enterprise and harvesting the local skills and ingenuity. It is one ground breaking decision that is sure to support Apple in maintaining its competitive edge in the next, even smarter generation.

The patented breakthrough in the super resolution promises to breaks the “glass ceiling” of existing technology, says the company, whose team includes world-experts from Technion’s Faculty of Computer Science, which is ranked #15 in the world. While conventional methods use conversion techniques to “blow up” or stretch the SD video onto an HD display, BetterVirw increases optical resolution of a video stream, generating an HD stream that looks as authentic as it gets.


BETTERview technology is based on a novel family of SR algorithms, proposed by a world-leader in this field, Prof. Michael Elad (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology). Elad and his collaborator, Dr. Matan Protter devised the first method that overcomes the requirement for very accurate and explicit motion estimation in previous SR technologies. The new family of SR techniques avoids the exact motion estimation and replaces it by a probabilistic estimate. This enables handling successfully general content scenes containing extremely complex motion patterns. 


The results are impressive, with no visual artifacts, and the process is completely robust. Based on this core technology, BETTERview developed the first cutting-edge industrial-grade robust system that perform SD to True HD resolution conversion. Its solution strengthens the above-mentioned core technology by handling various video artifacts, interlaced content, synchronization issues and run-time efficiency.


The innovative research of Prof. Michael Elad was listed in 2010 by Thomson Reuters Science Watch. You can read their interview with him here.

It has been known for the past 20 years that, in principle, one could take several low-quality images and fuse them into a single, higher-resolution outcome. This has been demonstrated by scientists, adopting various techniques and algorithms. The process is known as Super-Resolution (SR), which  became a hot field in image processing, with thousands of academic papers published during the past two decades on the problem and ways to handle it. The classical approach to fuse the low-quality images requires finding an exact correspondence between their pixels, a process known as “motion estimation”. Several years ago this field experienced a revolution, due to a breakthrough in the way to handle (or better yet, bypass altogether) the motion estimation. 

Imagine having a surgery with no knives involved. At TEDMED, surgeon Yoav Medan shares a technique that uses MRI to find trouble spots and focused ultrasound to treat such issues as brain lesions, uterine fibroids and several kinds of cancerous growths.

‘TIME’ honors InSightec’s Focused Ultrasound

Read full story at Israel 21C

Yoav Medan

The focused ultrasound beam can be seen during the treatment to ensure taht the ultrasound travels through a safe pathway to the focus. This ensures that the correct region is targeted.  Sonication parameters can be adjusted to optimize the treatment and are monitored by the physician during the treatment.

“A new definition of crystal emerged, one that is beautiful and humble and open to further discoveries. A humble scientist is a good scientist.”

Banquet Speech

Transcript: 

Award Ceremony Speech

For three millennia we have known that five-fold symmetry is incompatible with periodicity, and for almost three centuries we believed that periodicity was a prerequisite for crystallinity. The electron diffraction pattern obtained by Dan Shechtman on April 8, 1982 shows that at least one of these statements is flawed, and it has led to a revision our view of the concepts of symmetry and crystallinity alike. The objects he discovered are aperiodic, ordered structures that allow exotic symmetries and that today are known as quasicrystals. Having the courage to believe in his observations and in himself, Dan Shechtman has changed our view of what order is and has reminded us of the importance of balance between preservation and renewal, even for the most well established paradigms. Science is a theoretical construction on an empirical fundament. Observations make or break theories.

“Each time I was promoted there were colleagues fighting it…”

Distinguished Prof. Dan Shechtman displays his notebook at the Nobel Laureate lecture: Dec. 8th, 2011. Previously, colleagues hurled at him basic textbooks in crystallography and told him to read them!

Israeli professor Dan Shechtman was vilified for daring to challenge scientific orthodoxy

Read the full story at the Jewish Chronicle
By Nathan Jeffay, December 9, 2011

Shechtman at the Technion in Haifa, where his eureka moment led to a new theory about the way matter is arranged

It could be the closing scene of a feel-good film. But it will happen for real, tomorrow afternoon. Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman, mocked for years for his off-the-wall theory, has not only been proved correct, but he will climb to the podium at Stockholm Concert Hall and receive the Nobel Prize for chemistry. The award is often shared by several people , but he has it all to himself.

During an interview in his Haifa office shortly before travelling to Stockholm, Shechtman recalled the initial reaction to the work that earned the prize. His research-team leader gave him a bit of a talking to. “He came to my office and put a textbook on my desk, smiling sheepishly and telling me that I should read it, as what I was saying was impossible.”

Shechtman, a 70-year-old professor of materials engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, is a modern-day Archimedes. While most Nobel winners receive their prize after painstakingly developing a theory or idea over years, like the ancient scholar who got into the bath and saw the water level rise, Shechtman had a eureka moment.

It was the morning of April 8, 1982 and he was on sabbatical from the Technion at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington DC. He looked through his electron microscope, and found something that defied the laws of science, as they were understood.

Each time I was promoted there were colleagues fighting it

Until then, it was believed that atoms are always arranged in solids in symmetrical patterns, in groups of two, three, four or six. But he was looking at an alloy and found that it contained atoms in groups of 10 around a single point. They made a pattern that did not repeat itself, flying in the face of received wisdom that patterns will always be repeated. These formations became known as “quasicrystals” – and now represent a branch of science studied worldwide.

The Nobel committee said when announcing the award that Shechtman had “forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter”. But to get there was a long and sometimes humiliating battle. The team leader who demanded that he reread the textbook decided that he was bringing “disgrace” to his team and expelled him. Shechtman, who had dreamed of scientific accomplishment ever since his childhood, was not discouraged. “You can say it’s funny or you can say it’s stupid, but I showed everyone who was prepared to listen,” he recalls. “I even sent Chanucah cards with the pattern on them.”

When he returned from Washington in late 1983 he found many colleagues sceptical about his theory, but discovered an ally in the form of Ilan Blech, a professor in the faculty of materials science. This gave him the confidence to write an article on his findings and submit it to the Journal of Applied Physics. It came back with a rejection letter. “The editor didn’t even send it for peer review,” he says sadly. An improved version written with three collaborators, including Blech, was accepted by Physical Review Letters and published in 1984.

“Hell broke loose,” Shechtman recalls. He started receiving letters from scientists across the world saying they had be able to replicate his experiment, but there was also a very strong critical reaction. The International Union of Crystallography and the American Chemical Society led it. In their view, the fact that quasicrystals could only be seen on electron microscopes and not x-ray microscopes undermined the findings, and they believed that he was really looking at two structures of atoms and misreading it as a single one.

Leading the opposition was the only man ever to have won two Nobel Prizes, American chemist Linus Pauling. He reportedly used to say: “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.” Even in Shechtman’s own department at the Technion, “there were professors fighting against my promotion and each time I was promoted there was opposition,” he says.

It was not until 1987 that his findings started to become mainstream. Two groups of scientists managed to identify quasicrystals on an x-ray microscope. He recalls going to the International Union of Crystallography after this breakthrough. “They said: ‘Danny, now you’re talking’ and they accepted it.” When Pauling died in 1994, the opposition evaporated completely.

When the call came from the Nobel committee in October, he was told to keep the news a secret for half an hour, when it would be announced. “I sat at my desk for 20 minutes just looking around and thinking: ‘What does it mean?'” He was calm. “If you measured my heart rate now it is 60; I don’t know if at that moment it got as high as 61.” After 20 minutes he called his wife Zipora, a professor at Haifa University, “because she is always mad that I don’t tell her about prizes”.

He was, he says, completely unprepared for the euphoria at the Technion and his celebrity across Israel which followed. The pattern he discovered is the ultimate fashion statement at the Technion, where staff members wear ties decorated with it. Shechtman shows off a kippah with the pattern that a student crocheted for him to wear when addressing Jewish groups.

Asked what is the practical significance of his discovery, Shechtman gives a wry smile and says “very little”. Quasi-crystals have been used to make strong materials for razors and non-stick pans, but for Shechtman the important thing is the correction of an erroneous assumption about the world. In his opinion, “a humble scientist is a good scientist”, and by forcing a rethink on the basics, he believes he has made the scientific community more humble.

“The new definition of a crystal is a wonderful one, because it is humble,” he says. “It doesn’t say: ‘A crystal is…’ It says: ‘By a crystal we mean…'”

Shechtman’s personality fits his talk of humility. There is no ceremony – no waiting rooms or secretaries – when visiting his office. His hobbies confirm the impression that he is a patient man – he likes sailing and jewellery-making. He believes that there is a message for everybody in his prize. “If you find something, concentrate on it and try to see if it is real; listen to other people but if they aren’t interested, don’t take their words as fact. Continue to push your belief.”