Putting Liquid Biopsies on Solid Ground: Cancer Diagnosis from a Millilitre of Blood
Blood tests – simple, noninvasive and economically feasible – promise to become the next major milestone in cancer diagnosis. However, most of these tests, dubbed liquid biopsies, are currently not...
Neurons Caught Rapidly Switching Gears
Even during routine tasks such as a daily stroll, our brain needs to shift gears, switching from navigating the city to jumping out of the way of a bike or...
Sweetness That Comes at a Price: Sugar Substitutes May Affect the Human Body in Unanticipated Ways
Non-nutritive sweeteners – also known as sugar substitutes or artificial sweeteners – are supposed to deliver all the sweetness of sugar without the calories. But a controlled trial conducted by...
The Viruses That Fight Disease: A Surprising Precision Weapon against Crohn’s and Ulcerative Colitis
The myriads of microbes in our gut, collectively termed the microbiome, are considered important to our health, but they can also harbour bacteria that contribute to inflammatory bowel disease or...
Without Egg, Sperm or Womb: Synthetic Mouse Embryo Models Created Solely from Stem Cells, Outside the Uterus
An egg meets a sperm – that’s a necessary first step in life’s beginnings, and it’s also a common first step in embryonic development research. But in a Weizmann Institute...
Curbing Candida: The Cells That Keep Fungal Infections at Bay
Of all the fungi that live in the human body, the most infamous is probably the yeast Candida. This distant cousin of baker’s yeast is notorious for causing various types...
Scent of a Friend: Similarities in Body Odour May Contribute to Social Bonding
Weizmann Institute of Science researchers have found that people may have a tendency to form friendships with individuals who have a similar body odour. The researchers were even able to...
The Heat Is On: Weizmann Institute Scientists Uncover Traces of Fire Dating Back At Least 800,000 Years
They say that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and Weizmann Institute of Science researchers are working hard to investigate that claim, or at least elucidate what constitutes ‘smoke’. In an...
Changing the Channel: Study Sheds New Light on a Promising Antidepressant
Ketamine, a well-known anaesthetic used in smaller doses as a party drug, was hailed as a “new hope for depression” in a Time magazine cover story in 2017. Two years...
Harder Winters, Stronger Storms: New Data Reveals Climate Change Might Be More Rapid than Predicted
The Earth’s climate is changing faster than we expected. A new study led by the Weizmann Institute of Science reveals that storms in the Southern Hemisphere have already reached intensity...
Settled at Birth: Blood Vessels Remember Their Origins
Our family origins tend to shape our future in many ways. A Weizmann Institute of Science study, published in Nature, found that the same holds true for blood vessels. The...
Designing Proteins Just Got a Lot Easier
Studies at the Weizmann Institute of science is shows that AI is providing researchers the means to design biomolecules with a huge range of valuable functions – from medicine to...
Getting Under the Skin of an Autoimmune Disorder
Supporting actors sometimes steal the show, and in a new study published this week in Cell, researchers, headed by Professor Ido Amit at the Weizmann Institute of Science, showed that...
Mutations in Noncoding DNA Protect the Brain from ALS
Genetic mutations linked to a disease often spell bad news. Mutations in over 25 genes, for example, are associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and they all increase the risk...
Antibodies Fight Cancer Too
Immunotherapies for cancer rely on recruiting the patient’s immune system, but they still fall far short of tapping into the entire arsenal of the body’s natural defences. In fact, most...
Israel Joins the Quantum Computing Club
Building a working quantum computer is such a daunting venture that many believe it is only for tech giants and superpowers, something on a scale beyond Israel’s reach. However, Professor...
Tracking Multiple Genes with Flying Colours
Even fans of black-and-white film cannot deny that colour brought new life to photography and motion pictures – but when it comes to learning what happens inside the body, there’s...
A Noninvasive Test for Gut Inflammation
Today, people suspected of having inflammatory bowel disease are often required to undergo a colonoscopy, an invasive procedure performed under anaesthesia. A new method developed at the Weizmann Institute of...
Muscle Repair Study Could Lead to Better Cultivated Meat
One day the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Professor Eldad Tzahor peered into his lab’s microscope and saw steak. As part of Tzahor’s research into repairing muscle tissue, Dr Tamar Eigler,...
Going Out with a Bang
In the not-so-distant past, the discovery of a supernova – an exploding star – was considered a rare occasion. For example, when Professor Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute’s Particle...