Asides

“In recent decades, the field of brain research has become diverse and multidisciplinary,” explains Prof. Jackie Schiller of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. “Engineering tools are an integral part of the development of brain research and the application of brain devices as a solution for motor and cognitive impairments. Artificial systems that mimic the human brain have tremendous potential. Today, it is clear to us that only synergy between the various biological, computational and engineering disciplines will lead to significant progress in our understanding of the brain and its functions. What we need here is extensive and multidisciplinary research activity based on coherent in depth theoretical work and on preclinical and clinical studies.” Schiller’s research, published in the prestigious journal Neuron, examines brain plasticity mechanisms related to anticipation, feedback, learning and memory, specifically in relation to the receptive aspect of the neuron – the dendrite. Neurons are composed of several organelles: the cell body and nucleus; the axon a branched offshoot that extends from the cell body and transmits information; dendrites, the main input sites of the neuron; and the synapses, the point of connection between the axon of one cell and the dendrite of another. These channels of communication – axons, dendrites and synapses – are essential for brain function, and are the sites of various devastating brain diseases. Dendrites comprise most of the grey matter and occupy most of the volume of the cerebral cortex. They are tree-like branches, a few millimeters in length, which enable the cell to receive and process information from other neurons. In previous articles, Prof. Schiller demonstrated that dendrites are not simple structures but complex nonlinear processing machines, and now she has unveiled the mechanism behind their unique flexibility. “During the learning process, this mechanism changes the dendrite and synapse,” explains Schiller, “If we understand the precise nature of this mechanism we may be able to improve processes such as memory formation and potentially develop a novel class of treatment for neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases.”  

The highly pathogenic Staphylococcus aureus bacteria is one of the top five causes of hospital-acquired infections. From 1999 through 2005 in the US alone the estimated number of S. aureus related hospitalizations increased 62%, from 294,570 to 477,927. Publishing in Science, Prof. Meytal Landau of the Faculty of Biology has unveiled a radical insight into how the bacteria works within the body. The revelation is found in unique amyloid fibrils, through which the pathogenic Staphylococcus aureus bacterium attacks the human cells and immune system. The research could advance the discovery of antibiotics with new strategies to disable key bacterial toxins. Amyloids are proteins in cells that are known in association with neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The amyloids form a web of protein fibrils characterized by an orderly and extremely stable structure. This stability enables them to withstand extreme conditions in which ordinary proteins die. One of the best-known examples of this is the 1986 “Mad Cow” disease outbreak in England. According to Prof. Landau, “This disease surprised the scientific community because its cause was not a virus, nor a bacterium, but a protein called Prion, possessing an amyloid-like structure. It then became clear that a protein can be transmissible, and due to its stability, it infected human beings who consumed the contaminated beef – meaning, the protein did not break down in the stages of meat processing, cooking and digestion.” Landau estimates that the discovery will lead to the development of antibiotics with a new action mechanism. “From the very first moment, it was clear to us that what we had was a paradigm shift,” says Landau. Such drugs will inhibit the amyloid formation but not kill the bacteria, thus reducing the risk of bacterial resistance. “Resistance to antibiotics develops in bacteria due to evolutionary pressure. If we reduce the pressure on the bacterium and don’t kill it but rather prevent its pathogenic aspects, the resistance may not rush to develop.” The research was conducted by members of the Landau lab, including Einav Tayeb-Fligelman, Orly Tabachnikov, Asher Moshe and Orit Goldshmidt- Tran, with the assistance of Michael Sawaya from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and of Nicolas Coquelle and Jacques-Philippe Colletier from Université Grenoble, France.                  

Technion researchers have invented a new method that separates hydrogen production from oxygen production in the water splitting process using solar energy. This innovation will facilitate the centralized, safe and efficient production of hydrogen on tap. Publishing in Nature Materials, the researchers envision hydrogen production at the point of sale (for example, at a gas station for electric cars fueled by hydrogen) located far from the solar farm. The technology is forecast to significantly reduce the cost of producing the hydrogen and shipping it to the customer. Hydrogen is considered one of the most promising fuel alternatives because it can be produced from water, and therefore production does not depend on access to non-renewable natural resources. Most hydrogen is currently produced from natural gas in a process that emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but it is also possible to produce hydrogen from water by splitting the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen in a process called electrolysis. However, since electricity production itself is an expensive and polluting process, global research is exploring a photoelectrochemical (PEC) cell that uses solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen directly, without the need for external power source. The main challenges in the development of PEC solar farms for the production of hydrogen are keeping the hydrogen and the oxygen separate; collecting the hydrogen from millions of PEC cells; and transporting the hydrogen to the point of sale. The Technion team solved these challenges by developing a new method for PEC water splitting. With this method, The hydrogen and oxygen are formed in two separate cells – one that produces hydrogen, and another that produces oxygen, avoiding the risk of a flammable and explosive mixture. The study was led by Avigail Landman, a doctoral student in the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP). Landman is working on her doctorate under the guidance of Prof. Avner Rothschild from the Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering,and Prof. Gideon Grader, Dean of the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering. “According to our cost estimate, our method could successfully compete with existing water splitting methods and serve as a cheap and safe platform for the production of hydrogen,” says Landman. Prof. Gideon Grader holds the Arturo Gruenebaum Chair in Materials Engineering                   

The hydra, from the jellyfish family, is less than half an inch long. Yet it has long intrigued scientists with its ability to regrow itself completely from decimated parts. Now, Prof. Kinneret Keren from the Faculty of Physics with colleague Prof. Erez Braun and students Anton Livshits, Lital Shani-Zerbib, and Yonit Maroudas-Sacks, have revealed the role of the cytoskeleton in this process. Publishing in Cell Reports, the research team described how hydras have a structural memory that helps shape their new body plan according to a pattern inherited by the animal’s skeleton. Until now, it was believed that only chemical signals informed the hydra’s reformation. Regenerating hydras use a network of tough, stringy protein fibers, called the cytoskeleton, to align their cells. When pieces are cut or torn from hydras, the cytoskeletal pattern survives and becomes part of the new animal. The pattern generates a small but potent amount of mechanical force that shows cells where to line up. This mechanical force can serve as a form of “memory” that stores information about the layout of animal bodies. “You have to think of it as part of the process of defining the pattern and not just an outcome”, says Keren. When pieces of hydra begin the regeneration process, the scraps of hydra fold into little balls, and the cytoskeleton has to find a balance between maintaining the old shape and adapting to new conditions. “If you take a strip or a square fragment and turn it into a sphere, the fibers have to change or stretch a lot to do that,” explains Keren. However, some portions retain their pattern. As the little hydra tissue ball stretches into a tube and grows a tentacle-ringed mouth, the new body parts follow the template set by the cytoskeleton in fragments from the original hydra. The cytoskeleton is like a system of taut wires that helps the hydra keep its shape and function. The main cytoskeletal structure in adult hydra is an array of aligned fibers that span the entire organism. Damage to this cytoskeleton will disrupt the formation of new hydras, the researchers found. In one experiment, the researchers cut the original hydra into rings which folded into balls that contained multiple domains of aligned fibers. Those ring-shaped pieces grew into two-headed hydras. However, anchoring the hydra rings to stiff wires resulted in healthy one-headed hydras, suggesting that mechanical feedbacks promote order in the developing animal. Hydras are much simpler than most of their cousins in the animal kingdom, but the basic pattern of aligned cytoskeletal fibers is common in many organs, including human muscles, heart, and guts, says Keren. Studying hydra regeneration may lead to a better understanding of how mechanics integrate with biochemical signals to shape tissues and organs in other species. “The actomyosin cytoskeleton is the main force generator across the animal kingdom,” says Keren. “This is universal.”                

Does evolution depend on competition or collaboration? The discovery of antibiotics saved millions of lives, yet presently world health is in avicious spiral in which bacteria rapidly evolve to defeat available classes of antibiotics. Recruiting resources and knowhow from across the globe, Prof. Roy Kishony and colleagues are returning to the genius of nature to create superdrugs for superbugs. In a creative stroke inspired by the digital billboard for the Hollywood movie, Contagion, Kishony and his team at Technion and Harvard Medical School opened a global window to observe how bacteria evolve as they become impervious to drugs. Described in the September issue of Science, the large-scale experimental tool offered a first glimpse at bacteria adapting to increasingly higher doses of antibiotics, visible to the naked eye. A two-by-four foot petri dish was filled with 14 liters of agar, a seaweed-derived jelly-like substance commonly used in labs to nourish organisms as they grow. The dish was divided into sections saturated with incremental doses of antibiotics. Over the course of two weeks, a camera mounted on the ceiling above the dish took periodic snapshots. The result was a direct and detailed observation of bacterial movement, death and survival: evolution at work. The headline-grabbing Microbial Evolution and Growth Arena, was called the MEGA Plate for short. The video produced by the Kishony lab was viewed over 24 million times, likely making it the most viewed scientific experiment video of all times. According to Kishony, “Seeing bacteria spread for the first time was a thrill. Our MEGA-plate takes complex and often obscure concepts in evolution, such as mutations-selection, lineages, parallel evolution and clonal interference, and provides a visual seeing-is-believing demonstration. It is also a powerful illustration of how easy it is for bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics.” Co-investigators Michael Baym and Tami Lieberman said the images spark the curiosity of lay and professional viewers alike. Ultimately, in a dramatic demonstration of evolved drug resistance, bacteria spread to the highest drug concentration. In the span of 10 days, bacteria produced mutant strains capable of surviving a dose of the antibiotic trimethoprim 1,000 times higher than the one that killed their progenitors. When researchers used another antibiotic (ciprofloxacin) bacteria developed 100,000-fold resistance to the initial dose. Kishony’s lab is collaborating with Israel’s health services and with the Faculty of Computer Science to collate big data in order to develop “predictive genome-based” diagnostics capable of foreseeing bacterial evolution and provide the best treatment at the individual patient level. Roy Kishony is the Marilyn and Henry Taub Professor of Life Sciences and Head of the Lorry I. Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering.         

Black holes are massive collections of mass – with gravity so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. Stellar-mass black holes appear when massive stars explode. Supermassive black holes exist in the hearts of galaxies and usually contain the mass equivalent of millions of suns. Is a black hole the birth of a universe or the end of it? What happens when matter disappears at the event horizon? What is gravity? What is Hawking radiation? What can black holes tell us about the nature of quantum entanglement? In 1974, the Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking theorized that black holes should create and emit sub-atomic particles, known today as Hawking radiation. Observation of this proposed phenomenon remained a “holy grail” for the fields of atomic physics, nonlinear optics, solid state physics, condensed matter superfluids, astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics. Until last year, it remained just theoretical. But publishing in Nature Physics, Prof. Jeff Steinhauer presented first proofs that such radiation could exist. In his lab at the Faculty of Physics, Steinhauer has constructed a sonic black hole – an analogue of the real thing. “We observe a thermal distribution of Hawking radiation, stimulated by quantum vacuum fluctuations, emanating from an analogue black hole,” says Steinhauer. “This confirms Hawking’s prediction regarding black hole thermodynamics.” Pairs of entangled phonons (particles of sound) appear spontaneously in the void at the event horizon of the analogue black hole. One of the phonons travels away from the black hole as Hawking radiation, and the other partner phonon falls into the black hole. The pairs have a broad spectrum of energies. It is the correlation between these pairswhich allowed Steinhauer to detect the Hawking radiation. “We saw that such high energy pairs were entangled, while the low energy pairs were not. This entanglement verifies an important element in thediscussion of the information paradox as well as the firewall controversy,” explains Steinhauer. This observation of Hawking radiation, performed in a Bose-Einstein condensate, verifies Hawking’s semi-classical calculation, which is viewed as a milestone in the quest for the graviton – a fundamental particle of matter which should exist, but which hasn’t yet been found. Steinhauer has been working exclusively on the proof since 2009 in his hand-assembled lab at Technion, replete with lasers and dozens of mirrors, lenses, and magnetic coils to simulate a black hole. Motivated by an overriding curiosity regarding the laws of physics since he was a child, he says that evidence for the existence of quantum Hawking radiation brings us one step closer to uncovering the laws of our universe.             

The tremendous power of quantum computing can only be unlocked through knowhow within the field of quantum entanglement. Called by Einstein ‘Spooky action at a distance’, entanglement is the means through which physical entities relate to each other irrespective of the distance between them. Entangled entities cannot be defined separately. For example, two particles can be arranged in an entangled state such that if particle A spins one way, particle B (even if it is vastly separated in time and space) will spin the other way.The global challenge has been how to make entanglement work to our advantage in the revolutionary field of quantum computing. Now, Prof. David Gershoni and doctoral students Ido Schwartz, Dan Cogan, and Prof. Netanel Lindner, have developed and demonstrated a novel way to generate clusters of entangled photons on demand. Their results were published in Science. “In effect, we demonstrated how to develop a device that “shoots” entangled photons on demand,” explains Prof. Gershoni. “This discovery is an important milestone bridging current classical technology and future quantum technologies.” The conceptual idea of a quantum knitting machine, or a quantum “machine gun” to ensure supply-on-demand of entangled photons was first suggested by Lindner (originally a student of Prof. Asher Peres) and Prof. Terry Rudolf of Imperial College, London in 2009. “Our demonstration presents a breakthrough in quantum technology… it may have revolutionary prospects for technological applications as well as to our fundamental understanding of quantum systems,” announces the paper’s abstract. The device at the core of their experiment is a “quantum dot,” several tens of nanometers in size, and comprised of a semiconductor embedded in another type of semiconductor. The researchers used various optical and electrical means to cause the emission of photons at specified times. Gershoni’s breakthrough is in effect the first device that emits many entangled photons on demand. For some, Quantum Computing could still seem the stuff of science fiction, but Prof. Gershoni takes the fiction out of science. “I believe that our discovery will advance the field of quantum information processing,” he says, “and that in the near future we will be able to see genuine applications of quantum technologies in broad use.” Quantum computers could quickly calculate way beyond the limits of today’s fastest supercomputers. Billions of dollars are being invested globally in the field of quantum information by corporations such as IBM, Apple, Google, NSA and various other government agencies. Prof. David Gershoni holds the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Academic Chair.                     

Founder of the first Technion Society in 1923, Albert Einstein would remain an active Technion supporter throughout his life. Scientifically, Einstein’s Technion legacy continues until today. The 1946 publication in the Technion yearbook exemplifies his dedication to making sure the theory of relativity would be accessible to every student. “It is interesting to note that forty years after Einstein developed his theory and after his theory was universally recognized in the scientific community, he still thought it important to make it accessible to the educated intelligentsia,” comments Prof. Joseph Avron of the Technion Faculty of Physics. Founded in 1952, the Technion Department of Physics was led by Prof. Nathan Rosen, Einstein’s colleague. Rosen was one of the authors of the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paper, questioning the very basics of Quantum Theory. Rosen was given a free hand in the recruitment of faculty members and among others, brought in another Einstein colleague, the world-renowned physicist Prof. David Bohm. A student of Rosen, Asher Peres, would become the beacon bearer of the Einstein legacy at Technion. Distinguished Prof. Peres is acclaimed for his work connecting quantum mechanics and information theory. Under his mentorship, generations of Technion physicists have emerged. David Bohm – Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness. Albert Einstein (Technion faculty, 1955-57)    

With a device smaller than the width of a human hair, researchers will get greaterinsight into microscopic cells in order to understand and test different drug therapies. The water-wave laser is the brainchild of Prof. Tal Carmon, who is head of theOptomechanics Center at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. The innovation came when Prof. Carmon connected two areas of research that had been previously considered unrelated: nonlinear optics and water waves. The possibility of creating a laser through the interaction of light with water waves had not been previously examined due to the huge difference in frequency between waves of water and waves of light. A typical laser can be created by electron oscillations in atoms, causing them to emit radiation in the form of laser light. Prof. Carmon and team have now shown that waterwave oscillations within a liquid device can also generate laser radiation. An optical fiber delivers light into a tiny droplet of oil submerged in water. Light waves and water waves pass through each other, inside this droplet, approximately one million times, generating the energy that leaves the droplet as the emission of a waterwave laser. The interaction between fiber optic light and the miniscule vibrations on the surface of the droplet are like an echo, where the interaction of sound waves and the surface they pass through can make a single scream audible several times. In order to increase this echo effect in their device, the researchers used highly transparent, runny liquids, to encourage light and droplet interactions. Published in Nature Photonics, the research opens new horizons for scientists studying theinteraction of light and liquid phase matter at a scale smaller than the width of a human hair. The team included students Shmuel Kaminski, Leopoldo Martin, and Shai Maayani. Carmon did his postdoctoral research at CalTech, and recently returned to his alma mater the Technion from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he served as a tenured professor. Prof. Tal Carmon holds the Leona Chanin Career Development Chair.