Sorrow and Hope

Inventions & Innovations

Cell Therapy Reduces Amputation

{image_1}When two middle-aged American men paid a visit to doctors at the University of Michigan Medical Center, they could barely walk for more than five to six minutes at a time. Both suffered from blocked arteries in their legs. Balloons or stents could not help, and they were likely to lose their legs. Instead, they took part in a trial of a new form of cell therapy developed by Israeli company MultiGene Vascular Systems (MGVS), and now both are up and about.

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Waterspout: A Submergible Helicopter

{image_1}Seven students from the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in cooperation with four students from the Pennsylvania State University, have won first place in an annual undergraduate student design competition.

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Adding Insulin to Baby Formula

{image_1}In the first 24 hours of life, a nursing baby gets a big zing of power from its mother’s milk, especially insulin. “Insulin is 100 times more concentrated in the first milk a mother gives her baby than in the blood,” says Professor Naim Shehadeh, head of the Pediatric Diabetes Clinic at the Rambam Medical Center and on the faculty of the Technion Institute Medical School.

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Waterspout: A Submergible Helicopter

{image_1}Seven students from the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in cooperation with four students from the Pennsylvania State University, have won first place in an annual undergraduate student design competition.

Continue Reading »

Adding Insulin to Baby Formula

{image_1}In the first 24 hours of life, a nursing baby gets a big zing of power from its mother’s milk, especially insulin. “Insulin is 100 times more concentrated in the first milk a mother gives her baby than in the blood,” says Professor Naim Shehadeh, head of the Pediatric Diabetes Clinic at the Rambam Medical Center and on the faculty of the Technion Institute Medical School.

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Autistic Children get a “BioHug”

{image_1}An Israeli engineer and father of a son with autism, Raffi Rembrand devoured all the information about the treatment of deep pressure touch to produce a calming effect in agitated individuals with autism. However, he discovered that most existing devices were more like straitjackets, weren’t sensitive to changes in the patient’s movement, and couldn’t regulate the pressure based on the patient’s needs or body gauges.

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Vitamins Straight to Your Skin

{image_1}Tagra Biotechnologies has developed a microencapsulation system that delivers active materials to the skin when they are needed. This is the brave new world of skincare and also has applications for the dental and pharmaceutical industries.

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Producing Electricity with…Balloons?

{image_1}Joseph Cory, an Israeli scientist at Haifa’s Technion Israel Institute of Technology, has developed a new way to produce electricity using helium balloons made from fabric coated with photovoltaic (PV) solar cells. These balloons are much cheaper to build and install than existing solar panels and also take up far less room, a significant factor in an urban environment.

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Miniature Robots

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Anyone remember the 1966 science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage about a scientist traveling through the bloodstream of a human body in a microscopic submarine? Well, it’s not entirely science fiction anymore.

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Pilots Get Virtual View

{image_1}Fighter pilots have a lot to pay attention to. In addition to their targets ahead, they have to focus on an array of complicated flight instruments. Traditionally, this has meant occasional glances away from the destination or target, which can lead to potential distractions when every moment counts. But thanks to the new Helmet Mounted Display System (HMDS—developed by Israel’s Elbit Systems and its US subsidiary Vision Systems International (VSI)—pilots can keep their eyes where they should be, on their targets.

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