Just look at us Go

Just before the first Passover, over 3,500 years ago, Moses demanded of the Egyptian Pharaoh to “Let my People Go”. I’m sure that today Moses would be proud of the lengths to which the modern Jewish nation goes, in order to benefit humanity.

Israeli scientists are constantly going where no one has gone before.  Researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University have gone deep into the behavior of a mutant gene to discover a new molecular mechanism that governs how neuro-degenerative diseases such as ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) attacks motor neurons.  They have gone even further and identified that the protein MIF inhibits this mechanism.  Meanwhile, Israel’s BrainTech 2015 Conference has brought top international brain technologists to Tel Aviv to learn about the latest innovative ‘brain initiatives’ going on around the world.  And would you like to know what is going on in someone’s brain?  Well the winning project at this year’s Brainihack in Tel Aviv, Israeli-developed Emochat, used an Israeli Neurosteer Brain Computer Interface device to interpret another person’s emotions based on their brain activity.

In other parts of the body, Israeli scientists have engineered tiny robots to enable cancer-killing drugs to go directly to a tumor.  And two Israeli companies, Vectorious Medical and SHL Telemedicine are going forward with their systems that go over wireless networks to perform remote monitoring of heart patients. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBav6iT62Sw

Israel’s humanitarian workers go to any lengths to save lives.  The surgeons of Israel’s Save A Child’s Heart (SACH) regularly go into action to treat sick children from Syria, Iraq, or Jordan. And every Tuesday Palestinian Arab children from Gaza and Judea & Samaria arrive at Israel’s Wolfson medical center in Holon for treatment and check-ups by SACH doctors.  Then, whenever a natural disaster strikes citizens of a far away country, the Israeli organization IsraAID is always one of the first to go to their aid.  Residents of the tiny islands of Vanuatu called the Israelis “a light unto the nations” as IsraAID distributed over 40 tons of rice, flour and drinking water to residents of the Tongoa and Mataso islands that were devastated by Cyclone Pam.

Israel is going from strength to strength as its next generation follows in the footsteps of its Nobel Prize-winning scientists.  Twelve Israeli teenagers won the top prizes in the Intel-Israel Young Scientists Competition in Jerusalem.  Their projects covered medicine, mathematics, linguistics, music, anthropology and satellite technology.  All twelve will go to the finals in Pittsburgh and Milan and receive academic scholarships.  And Israel’s Center for Educational Technology has been going into the classroom to enroll hundreds of Israeli middle and high schools in the biggest computer-programming contest in Israeli history.  Students can win a share of prizes totaling NIS 100,000 by writing computer code using CodeMonkey - an Israeli interactive computer game.

Israeli entrepreneurs and innovators have gone far and wide recently:

-         To Barcelona, where crowds flocked to the Israel pavilion at the Mobile World Congress to see the innovative Israeli products and apps on show.

-         To New York, where around 250 Israeli startups and leading investors are taking part in the Israel Dealmakers Summit, which this year focuses on digital media, cleantech, Web infrastructure, medical equipment, big data and cloud computing.

-         Into orbit, where Israel’s Intelescope Solutions is transforming the forestry industry, using drone and satellite imagery to produce an accurate inventory of forests in the US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, Indonesia, India, and China.

-         Into kids educational games, where the 350 games developed by Israel’s TabTale have been downloaded 600 million times.

-         And into social enterprises, where Impact Investing Israel has organized Israel’s first Impact Investing Conference to motivate investors and startups to go and develop real tangible and measurable benefits to mankind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP4t3j4ZTAQ

 
  
Israelis go out of their way to help others.  On Good Deeds Day, which this year was on 24 March, a record number of Israeli volunteers joined in 10,000 projects, such as going in to neighborhoods to clean up nature parks and beaches, to distribute food to the needy and to go and help the handicapped and disadvantaged.  And as we go into the season of our Freedom, 110 Ukrainian Jews made their Exodus to Israel in a special refugee rescue flight sponsored by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

To finish, here is a video of Technion’s go-getting engineering students going speedily through a “moving” account of the Passover story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baQfqoZrEvI

 

Finally, please go and try out IsraelActive.com - my brand new on-line database of positive news stories from Israel.  Now anytime you wish you can go and search easily through 7000 news articles about the beneficial work that Israel is doing on almost every subject and in every part of the world.

Here in Israel, it’s all go!

Michael Ordman writes a free weekly newsletter containing positive news stories about Israel.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

For a free subscription, email a request to michael.goodnewsisrael@gmail.com

The Water of Life

Jewish tradition connects the five books of Moses (the Torah) with water.  For a healthy life, our sages say that you cannot go three days without either.  Recently there have been many news stories from Israel on the theme of water – all focusing on the Israeli priority of saving or benefiting human life.

The main inspiration for this blog was this summary of the miracle of how the drought-ravished Jewish State overcame a full-blown water crisis by investing $4 billion between 2002 and 2010 to develop water technology that keeps its population and industries alive.  Israel’s latest desalination plant, in Sorek, is now at full capacity, producing 627,000 cubic meters of drinking water daily. With the lowest rate of energy consumption in the world, its water is the cheapest and most efficient of any large-scale desalination plant.  Israel has exported this knowledge worldwide.  The San Diego desalination facility uses the reverse osmosis developed by Israel’s IDE Technologies, which has just opened a new office in the drought-ravished state of Texas.  The Norwegian company, EnviroNor, is recruiting Israeli expertise to provide the water-processing technology necessary for its project to convert secondhand oil barges into floating desalination and wastewater treatment plants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIMoaptdDWs

International interest in Israeli water technology has encouraged joint research between the USA’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Israel’s Ben Gurion University of the Negev.  And Sir Mark Walport - chief scientific adviser to the British Government mentioned the many Joint UK-Israeli water science projects being conducted at UK universities.  And the National Sanitation Foundation International (NSF) has certified the major product lines of Israel’s Amiad Water Systems.  The NSF evaluated that the water produced by Amiad’s automatic self-cleaning screen and microfibre technology is safe for human consumption across the USA and Canada.

Locally, Israeli water technology is restoring the Besor-Hebron River flowing through Beer Sheva, which for decades had been polluted by untreated wastewater from Palestinian Arab towns.  Now a 3-year project has been agreed between Israel, the PA and the Bedouin community to clean up the river. And please read about the water projects of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and its work with Bedouin communities, in its response to slanderous accusations in the New York Times.

You may also have missed the news that Israeli authorities helped alleviate flooding in Gaza from recent rains by transferring four pumps from the Palestinian Authority into the Gaza Strip (contrary to a fictitious report by the AFP news agency that Israel had opened dams).  Israel has also doubled its supply of water to Gaza from 1.3 to 2.6 billion gallons, and was praised for doing so by visiting inspectors from the European Union. 

There was little international recognition of the historic agreement signed by Israel and Jordan for the Red Sea-Dead Sea rescue pipeline project.  The $800 million agreement authorizes the construction of a 65 to 80 million cubic meter capacity desalination plant in Aqaba, Jordan that will produce fresh water to benefit both nations.  Nor much fanfare for Israel’s Water Authority opening of a new treatment facility for wastewater from the city of Tiberias that will allow Christian pilgrims to baptize themselves in clean Jordan River water.

Israel also is involved in countering some of the dangers associated with water.  Cyclone Pam has devastated the remote islands of Vanuatu, but already a multi-sector emergency response team from Israel-based IsraAID has arrived and is distributing drinking water.  More Israeli aid teams are on their way.  And should terrorists try to sabotage water systems, Jerusalem’s regional water & wastewater utility, Hagihon, has developed and installed one of the world’s most sophisticated security systems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPzlgpi7558

Israeli ingenuity has even developed medical treatments from water. IceSense3, developed by Israeli biotech IceCure Medical, uses frozen water (“cryoablation”) to destroy targeted tumors in less than 15 mins, with no pain.  IceCure has just received a $21 million injection of funds from Epoch Partner Investments to speed up the sales and distribution of its IceSense3 system to treat breast cancer.  And only Israeli scientists could have developed a “safe” virus to kill antibiotic resistant bacteria, from the wastewater of Jerusalem’s sewage system!

Water has also made a major contribution to Israel’s modern economic success.  Israel’s underwater natural gas discoveries are now well known.  However, you may not have realized that Israel’s location between two major oceans has given it a pivotal trading role in providing China with outlets to both the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.  And who would have thought that Russia would be importing large quantities of high-quality Israeli sea salt from Israel’s Salt of the Earth to make the salt water for tinned tuna and salmon produced in Russia’s Vladivostok and Korsakov regions.

To conclude we dive beneath the water to wish a “mazel tov” to the members of the scuba diving club in Caesarea that discovered the largest trove of gold coins ever found off Israel's Mediterranean “gold” coast.  The Israeli Antiquities Authority said the find of 2000 gold pieces, dating back more than 1000 years, was "so valuable that it's priceless". 

And finally, even underwater, Israel’s life-changing scientific ingenuity surfaces - as demonstrated by the laying of the cornerstone of the new deep-sea research labs for Haifa’s Mediterranean Sea Research Center.  The lab will develop underwater robots, vehicles, optics, acoustics and propulsion systems.

  

Israel – keeping humanity afloat!

Michael Ordman writes a free weekly newsletter containing positive news stories about Israel.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

For a free subscription, email a request to michael.goodnewsisrael@gmail.com