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Technion’s Mad Dash

Technion’s Formula Student Team Competing in the 2014 Formula SAE Championship in Italy Awarded Special Prize

Technion Formula Team 2014

The Technion delegation to the International Formula Student Race returned to Israel last week after winning a special prize, awarded to them by the chief designer of the Fiat Group (Alpha Romeo, Maserati and Ferrari), for the best design and for showing the greatest improvement since the previous competition. In the overall rankings, the team came in 28^th place out of 44.

The leaders of the team, which consists of some 40 students from different Technion faculties, are Doris Pitilon and Ahmad Omri.

Doris, who was born in the US and grew up in Holon, completed her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering this summer within the Academic Reserves/Atuda framework (a program which enables youngsters who are intended to join the army as soldiers, to study academic studies prior to their military service); she will shortly be called up to the IDF’s Ordnance Corps.

Ahmad, who grew up in Germany and in Sandala Village near Afula, completed his undergraduate degree at the Technion through the NAM (an acronym in Hebrew for Outstanding Arab Youth) Program and is currently pursuing his master’s degree in mechanical engineering. Members on the student formula team emphasized the tremendous contribution of Prof. Reuven Katz’s, Head of the Center for Manufacturing Systems and Robotics at the Faculty of Mechnical Engineering, who helped them with the fundraising efforts of the project, supplied them with a lab to work in, and incorporated this program into the annual course under his guidance: “New Product Design.”

Technion formula in action

The Group’s activity was funded in part by the Grand Technion Energy Studies Program (GTEP).

“The minute I heard about this project I wanted to be a part of it,” said Michael Kootzenko, a student from the Faculty of Aerospace, who was in charge of the car’s exterior surface; Kootzenko also drove the car in the competition. “Constructing the car for me was the fulfillment of a childhood dream. We built a car that was much stronger than what was required, and I’m extremely proud of the outcome.”

“I was attracted to this project because I wanted to do something practical during my studies,” adds Doris Pitilon, “And constructing the car is mechanical engineering at its best. It has been the main thing on my mind over these past two years, and what I gained in terms of management and engineering I would never have learned anywhere else. The competition itself was an amazing experience. Teams came from all over the world to compete. We all camped out together near the racetrack, and the atmosphere was truly great.”

The competition included a review of engineering aspects (“the immobile part of the competition”), followed by the various examinations evaluating acceleration, speed and performance. “We learned from our mistakes last year and came to this year’s competition well prepared with a stronger and faster car. We excelled in the acceleration heat (75m in 4.3 seconds), and also in the endurance heat.”

The Technion race car had four drivers from the team: Doris, Michael, Gilad Agam and David Amarilio. Over the past year, the drivers trained at “Dan Karting” in Haifa, where they were provided with access to a simulator and training free of charge. Other donors included Kanfit Ltd., which supplied the carbon composite materials for the car’s body, and “Plasko” that transported the car to and from Italy. Presently, the team is working on formulating the 2015 student formula team, which will represent the Technion in next year’s competition.

See how the team prepares for the championship race:

The SAE International has been organizing international events and competitions for engineering students for over thirty years. Its most prestigious competition is the Formula Student SAE Championship, in which students are required to design and manufacture a race car.

Technion and German Researchers Successfully Develop the World’s Smallest Propeller that may be able to Move within the Human Body

In the future, it will enable the development of a drug delivery system capable of penetrating the cell with the aid of a relatively low magnetic field

German and Technion scientists managed to successfully develop the world’s smallest propeller driven by an external rotating magnetic field. This is what has been reported by the scientific journal “ACS Nano.” The scientists hope that this technology will allow development of a drug delivery system directed at cells with penetration capability with the aid of a relatively low magnetic field in the future.

“Tissue and biological fluids are complex viscoelastic media, with a nanoporous macromolecular structure. We show that nano-sized screw propellers can be accurately navigated in biomimetic gel (i.e.  a synthetic imitation of biological gel),” explains Associate Professor Alex Leshansky from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering. Professor Leshansky co-authored the article with Dr. Morozov and the group of Professor Peer Fisher from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany. “The diameter of these nano-screws (that is, propellers similar to bacterial flagellum that are driven by rotation, like a corkscrew) is about 70 nanometers and they are smaller than previously reported nano-propellers as well as any motile microorganism. We have demonstrated that although the nano-propellers are too tiny to be controllably steered in liquids such as water due to random Brownian motion, they are able to move in viscous fluids (such as glycerin) with velocities similar to micro-propellers (that is, propellers the size of micro-meters).  However, nano-propellers that are driven through a gel have a significant advantage: their dimensions are of the same size range as the gel’s mesh size. As a result, within the gel, the nano-propellers actually display significantly enhanced propulsion velocities, exceeding the highest speeds measured in glycerin as compared with micro-propellers, which show very low or negligible propulsion. The nano-screws have a significant potential for applications in extracellular environments, and furthermore, they are sufficiently small to be taken up by cells”

In the illustration:

Picture 1: SEM image (taken by a scanning electron microscope) of a nano-propeller (on the left); a schematic drawing of a nano-propeller moving in gel and its track (on the right). The polymeric mesh structures hinders the larger helices from translating effectively, whereas smaller propellers with a diameter close to the mesh size can pass through the network without being affected by the macroscopic viscoelasticity caused by the entangled polymer chains.

Technion breakthrough opens new avenues for Alzheimer’s cure

HAIFA, ISRAEL and NEW YORK (July 10, 2014) – Alzheimer’s disease affects approximately 5.2 million people in the United States alone, and it is the nation’s sixth leading cause of death.  A cure for this insidious killer has so far proven elusive, but that could soon change as a result of a breakthrough at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology that sheds light on a key mechanism in the accumulation of protein plaques in the tissue of Alzheimer’s disease patients.

The findings were published online this week by Nature Chemical Biology.

“Proteins that constitute major building blocks of our body cells continuously pass through quality control,” explains team leader Prof. Michael Glickman, of the Faculty of Biology. “Defective proteins are sent to the proteasome, a molecular machine (found in all of our cells) that eliminates defective proteins by recycling them back to their building blocks. But a small number of them slip through this process. Proteins that evade the proteasome accumulate, and may be harmful when they reach a critical mass, which is often the case at an advanced age.”

The researchers’ breakthrough findings are centered on UBB +1, a mutation prevalent in Alzheimer’s disease patients.  The mutation impairs a protein called ubiquitin* that marks other proteins to be dismantled at the proteasome.

Previously, the prevailing view among scientists was that UBB +1 impairs the functioning of the proteasome itself.  But in her doctoral dissertation under the guidance of Prof. Glickman, Dr. Daria Krutauz found that in the presence of UBB+1, damaged proteins are apprehended on their way to the proteasome, and accumulate without reaching their final recycling destination.  As a result, they have more opportunity to form the deadly plaque associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

“Because our findings run contrary to what was previously believed, this discovery opens new venues for intervention in the hope of developing a cure for Alzheimer’s disease,” says Prof. Glickman.

The research team was comprised of Prof. Michael Glickman, Dr. Daria Krutauz and Lab Manager Noa Reis, in collaboration with team members in the labs of Prof. David Fushman at the University of Maryland, Prof. Steve Gygi at Harvard Medical School and Prof. Ashraf Brik at Ben Gurion University.

In the photos: Prof. Michael Glickman, Dr. Daria Krutauz

* In 2004, Distinguished Professors Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion, and Prof. Ernie Rose from the Fox Chase Institute were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their discovery of ubiquitin.

Iron Dome, developed by Technion graduates, again defends Israel.

Read more.

Assistant Professor Avi Avital is taming rats to detect explosives and construct animal models as a working platform for the treatment of diseases such as schizophrenia.

Assistant Professor Avi Avital from the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, is training rats in an attempt to build (along with Professors Moshe Gabish and John Finberg) – a working model for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Huntington. He recently built a working model to validate symptoms of schizophrenia: “We gave rats a low sub-anesthetic dose of ketamine (a veterinary anesthetic) and exposed them to stress to build a working model for the treatment of schizophrenia – for an understanding of the factors responsible for disease outbreak and experimental platforms for drug development.”

איור המתאר את מעבדתו ואופן עבודתו של פרופוסר משנה אביטל

As part of an applied research study, Assistant Professor Avital succeeded in taming rats to detect explosives. “Rats have a highly developed sense of smell and we succeeded in taming them to identify scents of explosive materials,” he said. “The insights from a study of rat models are being implemented in dog training in a collaborative study with the Israel Ministry of Defense and the United States Army (USA).”

“In an extensive mapping study we conducted, we exposed rats to stress at different periods of their lives, and we found that the critical period for exposure to stress is during the same transition period between childhood and adolescence in humans,” he said.

On the account of an NIH grant from the American Defense Department, Assistant Professor Avital built a sophisticated laboratory of behavioral biology, which is studying rats mainly in the area of attention and social interaction, in combination with behavioral aspects of physiological and pharmacological research. In parallel of performing his clinical research, which he conducts at the Emek Medical Center in Afula, he continues his work with dogs. Recently, he developed a device that simulates explosive materials as part of a systematic and safe dog training process. In this field he newly demonstrated the importance of the link between stress level and attention of a dog’s customary ability to execute various tasks. He also found that if the dog detects one type of explosive, he is capable of generalizing and identifying other types of explosives. “We have shown that this ability to generalize is found in the same brain region of both dogs and rats,” he explained.

Assistant Professor Avital developed a way to train rats through behavioral shaping procedures. He clothes rats with a “vest” that is connected to tiny metals imbedded under the rat’s skin (using a minimal-pain procedure). The rat feels a light tap – he taught them that when the tap is felt on the right hand side to turn left, and vice versa. When tapping both shoulders, the rat will stop, etc.

In the study investigating social cooperation, Assistant Professor Avital built a labyrinth that is controlled automatically by software and a camera through which rats learn social cooperation. “Female rats cooperate better than males,” he emphasized.

Assistant Professor Avital’s work is unique because it is beyond translational science (circumspect conclusions of a rat model to humans); he conducts half translational science, that is: he makes inferences from one animal (rats) to another (dogs). Using behavioral, physiological and pharmacological methods, Assistant Professor Avital focuses on attention and social cooperation in all research levels aforementioned.

In the photo:

A lab rat and an illustration depicting the laboratory and Assistant Professor Avital’s work methods.

The video displays a rat dressed in a “vest.”