Israel's team ranks in 31st place overall; brings home total of five medals

Source: Ynetnews

Israel's team for the International Mathematical Olympiad completed the 2012 competition with five medals including three silver, one bronze and one with a special citation.

The competition which was held in Argentina saw 100 teams from around the world competing for gold. North Korea, China, the US, Russia and Canada were at the top of the rankings while Israel's team reached 31 place, shared with Germany, and came ahead of teams from France (38), Switzerland (52) and Finland (65).

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International team of astronomers discover new model for detecting the universe's first stars.

Source: Jpost

An international team of astronomers led by scientists at Tel Aviv University have discovered a new model for detecting the first stars formed when the universe was in its infancy.

Using powerful 3-D computer models, they have shown that due to a difference in the speed of gas and dark matter in the early stages of the universe, the first stars clumped together into a “cosmic web” formation. Their discovery of these web-like structures now makes it feasible for radio astronomers to detect the light wavelength from hydrogen that was heated by the first stars when the universe was only 200 million years old, said the astronomers, who recently published their findings in the journal Nature.

Star formation is a part of our cosmic history, said team leader Prof. Rennan Barkana, a researcher at TAU’s School of Physics and Astronomy. Astronomers know that long before there were stars, the early universe was filled with a hot, uniform gas. But today, there is a complex universe of stars and galaxies. A great unknown frontier is the era of the formation of the first stars, which marked the transformation of the universe into its current state.

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An Israeli-American research team teases out origin based on DNA, with remarkable accuracy.

Source: Haaretz

Who are you? Where were your grandparents from, and their grandparents, and theirs? Anecdotes aside, can anybody really peer into the darkness of history and know where his family originated? 

That's a yes, thanks to a remarkably accurate method created by an Israeli-American research team, based on genetics, to pinpoint geographic origins. The method represents a leap forward in geneticists' ability to trace the origins of people with mosaic ancestry.

Beyond the fascinating glimpse into history that comparative genetic mapping can provide, a more immediately useful function could be to predict a propensity for certain diseases based on genetic lineage.

The researchers, Eran Halperin from Tel Aviv University and Eleazar Eskin from the University of California, Los Angeles, studied DNA samples from 1,157 people from across Europe. They analyzed about half a million genomic sites prone to mutation, forming a genetic fingerprint of mutation that differed from person to person.

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New strain of plant possesses same pain-relieving qualities without intoxicating, numbing side effects

Source: Ynetnews

Good news for medicinal marijuana consumers: Israeli scientists have successfully developed the first strain of cannabis that doesn't cause intoxication.

The unique strain was grown in the greenhouse of the medical cannabis company Tikun Olam, and tested by Professor Ruth Galili of the Hebrew University's department of Immunology. The company has recently begun to offer the drug to patients eligible for medicinal marijuana treatment.

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Using a molecular method for examining ancient DNA, researchers over were able to replicate entire genetic sequence of virus, and compare it to genetic sequences collected from Westerners over the past 60 years.

Source: Haaretz

Israeli and Korean researchers have succeeded in reconstructing the genetic code of the hepatitis B virus from a sample taken from a 16th-century mummy discovered in South Korea.

The research, by scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Hadassah-University Hospital and the Seoul University Medical School in South Korea, used a sample from the mummy of a child from the Joseon dynasty, whose body and internal organs had been well-preserved. A microscopic examination of a sample taken from the liver was done to locate the presence of the hepatitis B genetic markers.

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Israeli scientists for the first time succeeded in transforming the skin cells of heart-failure patients into healthy heart-muscle cells, suggesting that it may be possible to repair the organ with a person’s own tissue.

Source: Nocamels

The finding points to a novel potential source of stem cells, the building blocks of life which can grow into any type of tissue in the body. Using skin cells from the patient would avoid the difficulty of obtaining stem cells from embryos and may limit the risk that the patient’s immune system would reject the transplant, which can occur with cells taken from healthy people and given to the sick.

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