Levitt Letter Extra News

The remains of a sarcophagus believed to be King Herod’s are on display during a press conference at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2008. Israeli archaeologist Prof. Ehud Netzer announced at a press conference Wednesday that analysis of newly revealed items found at the site of King Herod’s mausoleum at Herodium provided researchers with further proof of the site being the actual grave site of the Jewish King. (AP photos/Bernat Armangue)

By Steve Weizman Associated Press

HERODIUM, West Bank (AP) — Israeli archaeologists excavating what they believe is the tomb of biblical King Herod said Wednesday they have unearthed lavish Roman-style wall paintings of a kind previously unseen in the Middle East and signs of a regal two-story mausoleum, bolstering their conviction that the Jewish monarch was buried here.

Ehud Netzer, head of the team from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, which uncovered the site at the king’s winter palace in the Judean desert in 2007, said his latest finds show work and funding fit for a king.

“What we found here, spread all around, are architectural fragments that enable us to restore a monument of 25 meters high, 75 feet high, very elegant, which fits Herod’s taste and status,” he told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday at the hillside dig in an Israeli-controlled part of the West Bank, south of Jerusalem.

Herod is known for extensive building throughout the Holy Land.

Netzer said that since finding fragments of one ornately carved sarcophagus in 2007, he and his team have found two more, suggesting that the monumental tomb may have been a royal family vault.

“A mausoleum like the one which we have here was generally built by a king but not (necessarily) only for himself, many times for his children and his family, like the famous mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, of Hadrian in Rome,” he said. “It’s not a surprise that we found here more than one sarcophagus.”

Herod was the Jewish proxy ruler of the Holy Land under imperial Roman occupation from 37 B.C. and reigned for more than six decades.

The ruler is known to have had a taste for extravagance.

Netzer described the winter palace, built on a largely manmade hill 2,230 feet high, as a kind of “country club” with a pool, baths, gardens fed by pools and aqueducts, and a 650-seat theater.

In Herod’s private box at the auditorium, the diggers discovered delicate frescoes depicting windows opening on to painted landscapes, one of which showed what appeared to be a southern Italian farm, said Roi Porat, one of Netzer’s assistants on the digs

Just visible in the paintings, dating from between 15-10 B.C., are a dog, bushes, and what looks like a country villa.

Site surveyor Rachel Chachy-Laureys said they were executed using techniques unknown in the Holy Land at the time and must have been done by artisans especially imported from Italy.

“There has been no other discovery of this type of painting in the Middle East, as far as we know, until now,” she said.

Gidon Foerster, a professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University not connected with this dig, agreed that the art is “unique” here. “The artists were most likely brought in from Italy to work on this,” he said. “This kind of art has never been found in Israel before. King Herod is said to have been buried there and this proves it as much as it can possibly be proved.”

Herod’s most famous construction project was expanding the Jewish Second Temple in Jerusalem, but the Herod of the Bible and of Christian tradition was a bloodthirsty megalomanic, who flew into a paranoid frenzy when he encountered the three wise men on the way to Bethlehem with gifts for the baby Jesus and telling of the birth of a new king of Israel.

“Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceedingly wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under…” (Matthew 2:16).

The account, however, does not appear in other Gospels, and experts are not convinced of its accuracy.

Historians do agree that toward the end of his reign, Herod slaughtered many political rivals and perceived plotters, among them one of his 10 wives and three of his sons.

The first century A.D. historian Josephus Flavius wrote that as the elderly Herod lay riddled with disease, he ordered the cream of the local Jewish aristocracy to be executed on his death, so that his passing would bring widespread mourning.

Josephus describes Herodium and Herod’s lavish funeral there.

After Herod’s death in the first century B.C. Herodium became a stronghold for Jewish rebels fighting Roman occupation, and the site suffered significant battle damage before it was conquered and finally destroyed by Roman forces in A.D. 71, a year after they destroyed the Jerusalem temple.

The insurgents reviled the memory of Herod as a Roman puppet, and Netzer and his team believe that the violence with which the first stone casket was smashed suggests they knew it held his bones.

“That sarcophagus was found shattered all over the place, it seems it was taken from its place and was destroyed in a fit of rage,” Porat said. “That, among other things, is what tells us it was the sarcophagus of Herod.”

No human remains or inscriptions proving conclusively that the tomb was the king’s have been found, but excavation work continues.

By Sam Ser, www.JPost.com Apr. 17, 2008

It doesn’t look like much, this thing lying dormant in the grassy driveway of Shmuel Ovadia’s exceedingly modest offices in south Tel Aviv. Still, Ovadia insists, this bunch of plywood and rusting engines, bolted together in an old shipping crate, could save the planet.

The box of parts, and the large metal arm lying on top of it, is meant to be stationed a few kilometers away, just off the coast. There, in the surf that endlessly laps at the shore, a set of Ovadia’s buoys would exploit one of the world’s most reliable � and most potent � sources of energy.

The idea is fairly simple: Every wave on the ocean represents a significant amount of force; if even some of that tremendous energy could be harnessed, it could be turned into electricity.

“They say that just 1 percent of the energy in the oceans could power the entire world,” Ovadia says, with a raise of the eyebrows and a nod of the head, as if to stave off any “no way” reaction. It is, he assures, a viable goal.

The tricky part of realizing such potential is finding a way to capture as much of that energy as possible and turn it into electricity in a safe and cost-efficient manner. Until now, the dozens of contraptions that have been tried � although tantalizing and inspiring � have proven unable to meet that challenge.

Part of the problem lies in the sheer brute force of the sea. One apparatus, a 750-metric-ton device, was torn to shreds off the coast of Scotland as it was being put in place. And that was in relatively shallow water. Attempts to harvest the even more powerful currents farther out to sea and deeper down require complicated feats of engineering that make such efforts impractical in the near future.

The beauty of Ovadia’s system, he says, lies in its simplicity. Rather than try to channel the ocean’s power, Ovadia wants to go along for the ride. His buoys lie atop the water, at or just off the beach. As waves raise the buoys, attached hydraulic arms, contract � turning an alternator, creating electricity. The entire process is fully automatic, and requires not a drop of fuel.

“I don’t need smoke-belching towers, I don’t need turbines, I don’t need anything polluting,” Ovadia says. What’s more, he adds, his company’s zero-emissions, quiet power plants could produce commercial amounts of electricity while taking up just a 10th of the space required by coal-burning or natural gas-burning power plants. The lower infrastructure costs, combined with lower per-kilowatt production costs, mean that the original investment in an ocean wave power plant manufactured by his firm SDE would be repaid in five years � a fourth of the time that most conventional power plants need to “earn their keep.”

With all these advantages, you’d think potential clients would be busting down Ovadia’s door. According to him, they are � and they are hailing from some unusual places. In addition to some general interest from companies and governments in Chile, Argentina, Spain, Cyprus, Monaco and other countries, SDE is in very serious negotiations with the government of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state.

“We are very interested in this technology,” Dr. Faizul Ishom of the State Ministry for Development of Disadvantaged Areas told The Jerusalem Post. “We are an island country with a lot of beaches, so it could be very good for us, and for our environment too. We want to apply this. I have already talked with power companies about it.”

Ishom and other Indonesian officials have visited SDE’s offices here, and they hope to return soon to finalize a deal. Initially, Ishom said, his country is looking to buy an ocean wave power plant capable of producing 100 MW, at a cost of $650 million. If that plant is successful, Indonesia would be interested in another one on the scale of 500 MW.

Pakistan � the world’s only nuclear-armed Muslim state and, like Indonesia, a nation that has no formal diplomatic ties with Israel � is also eager to have Ovadia’s company build a power plant for its citizens, an official confirmed to the Post. Count India and Sri Lanka among the countries in talks with SDE, as well.

Ovadia is focusing on Africa as a potential market, too. The general manager of the Zanzibar Electricity Corporation confirmed talks over a power plant between 10 MW and 100 MW in capacity. Tanzania, whose severely unstable electricity supply has crippled its already fragile economy, is eager to see a 500 MW plant constructed as soon as possible. Gambia, in a similar situation, paid for Ovadia to make a presentation in the capital.

“One of our country’s biggest challenges is that we have no reliable source of energy,” Ebrima Camara, of the Office of the President, told The Post. “If we had, we could increase our potential to attract investors for industry and manufacturing. We really want to be able to give our people the ability to be self-reliant and productive, so if we can get a technology like this, which would make electricity cheaply and reliably, it would mean a lot for Gambia.”

Following what Camara described as “a very fruitful meeting,” Gambia and SDE are negotiating over a 70 MW power plant in a deal that would be worth millions of dollars.

For all this attention from the rest of the world, though, Ovadia lacks recognition here at home.

“I used to get research grants from the Industry and Trade Ministry,” Ovadia says, noting that his funding was cut in 2000, following a severe leg injury that kept him out of work for two years and prevented him from meeting deadlines that would have qualified him for further support. “Now,” he says bitterly, “I’m just a pest to the government.”

What Ovadia wants, he says, is not money, but recognition.

“Israel has maybe 10,000 meters of breakwaters along its shores. Those breakwaters could produce 10% of the country’s electricity needs. If we could put our buoys on the breakwaters, they would not only produce electricity, but also act as a kind of shock absorber and lengthen the life of the breakwaters,” he says, getting excited.

“I can build a plant here, for example, that will produce 100 MW of electricity. This is not meant to answer all the country’s needs, but it can definitely provide a good chunk. And with oil selling for more than $100 per barrel, it’s definitely worth considering.”

That there is very little consideration of the potential in SDE’s system vexes Ovadia. The Israel Electric Corporation “pretends to be interested in my technology,” he says, “but in reality it sees us as a threat.”

IEC did not respond to that claim, but acknowledged it had no interest in SDE or ocean wave energy. A spokesman for the Office of the Chief Scientist of the Industry and Trade Ministry said the body was continuing to invest in local research and development of alternative energy options, but had no particular interest in Ovadia’s ideas at this time.

Ovadia claims he is doomed by bureaucrats swayed by lobbyists for conventional energy firms offering kickbacks, payoffs and the promise of cushy “adviser” jobs in the power industry upon leaving office.

“It’s no wonder that, when you ask officials about my ideas, they come up with excuses like, ‘This isn’t the time for this sort of thing,’ or ‘It isn’t convincing enough,’ or ‘The technology isn’t ready yet.’ They prefer to protect the interests of those who sell coal or who operate coal-powered plants,” Ovadia says. “Why? Those are deals worth billions. You think someone would risk losing that by supporting my little buoys?”

Ovadia doesn’t name names. Is he paranoid? Making excuses for his failure to inspire his countrymen? Either is possible, or both. Or, it may just be that he is exhausted from the efforts of trying to infect bureaucrats with the exuberance of a dreamer.

At 56, with his hair dyed black and agitation exaggerating the lines that middle age and frustration have carved into his face, it is clear that it hasn’t been easy for Ovadia, being told over and over again for decades that his idea wouldn’t work.

It was as a soldier on leave, waiting outside the old Yaron Cinema in South Tel Aviv, that he first considered the potential of ocean waves. Sitting on the railing as waves rolled toward his feet, Ovadia was mesmerized. There must be a way, he figured, to turn that hypnotic motion into something useful.

It took Ovadia, who pulls out forms detailing his 17 different patents, more than a decade to develop his foggy notion into concrete reality. After completing his service in the Engineering Corps, he worked in a plant manufacturing motors, learning about pneumatics, hydraulics and electricity. Eventually he struck upon the idea of a way to put the waves’ own energy to use.

The theory behind wave energy exploitation goes back ages; bringing theory to practice often takes ages. As he brought SDE to life, Ovadia built and tested eight different models of his system, starting with one so small that it fit in his bathtub. He made each of the models larger, until they required a shipping container full of water, and eventually tested his current system in the Jaffa Port.

Along the way there have been numerous disappointments, including what he calls obstruction from the Israeli establishment and what he vaguely refers to as “some troubles with unscrupulous partners.”

Then there are the nagging questions � about whether the relatively gentle waves licking at the country’s Mediterranean coast are strong enough to make this technology worthwhile; about the ability of SDE’s buoys to survive and operate in the brutal environment of seawater, and about the environmental damage that could result from installing a power plant of this type on the shore.

Ovadia has heard these complaints, it seems, a thousand times before. Yet he patiently addresses each issue.

No matter where an ocean wave power plant is, Ovadia explains, it would produce different levels of energy during different times of the year, as waves are higher during certain periods and lower during others. Likewise, waves are higher and more powerful in some parts of the world (coastal areas on the North Sea, for example) than others (such as the calmer beaches of the eastern Mediterranean, to our disadvantage).

True, he notes, the potential benefit in relation to other methods of producing electricity would not be as great here as in Britain or Spain, but it would still be significant. And his power plants would be economical to run even in areas where weaker waves predominate.

“But I’ll tell you something,” he says. “Even in the Kinneret, I can make energy.”

An SDE power plant, Ovadia continues, “can produce electricity at a fraction of the cost of coal, a fraction of the cost of solar and a fraction the cost of wind. Run one six months to eight months per year, and you still come out ahead.”

Further, he says, “When are waves the highest? In the summer and in the winter. And when is the demand for electricity highest? In the summer and in the winter. It’s a perfect match.”

What about reliability? Compared to the other wave energy systems being developed around the world, Ovadia’s invention seems downright flimsy.

What his design has going for it, he says, is that the buoys actually see less exposure to seawater than the other systems. There is a built-in self-correcting mechanism whereby, should a large wave overwhelm the buoy, it would flip over and then “wait” for lower tide to flip back. Unlike other systems deployed far out to sea, the moving parts in his power plants are easily replaceable. Also, the plants can be maintained easily, and they can be run automatically. One person, he says, could run five plants at a time, if necessary.

Lastly, what of the environmental impact?

“Strictly speaking, the beach would be damaged slightly if we installed these,” Ovadia says. “But on the other hand, people die from the pollution caused by power plants burning fossil fuels. Which would you prefer?”

Besides, with such little interest here, he notes wryly, “It isn’t as if we’re going to take over Frishman Beach tomorrow.”

Fortunately, Ovadia says, beaches needn’t be marred. In his preferred scenario, a breakwater would be built first, and the buoys attached to it. A place like the Ashdod Port, where a 3,350 meter-long main breakwater and a sea wall 800 meters long already exist, would be an ideal location for SDE to prove its technology.

Just in the past few weeks � after years of fruitless lobbying all over the country � Ovadia has won over the Ashdod Municipality to the merits of such a plan.

“The mayor and the city engineer have looked over this idea thoroughly, and it seems quite worthwhile to us,” said David Hartum, deputy director-general of the Ashdod Municipality. “We are suggesting building on the breakwater in the port. We like the fact that it’s ecological, as ocean waves do the job instead of oil, and that it involves a one-time cost to produce electricity. We are definitely interested.”

The only thing standing in the way of the country’s first ocean wave power plant, then, is the Israel Ports Authority, whose approval for the project is required. A spokeswoman for Shlomo Breiman, director-general of the Israel Ports Authority, said he was looking into the idea, but would have to review thorough studies on the potential environmental impact on the port basin – and any potential impact on the port’s operations, especially – before giving the project a green light.

Should SDE win a contract to build a power plant in Ashdod, it would certainly mean vindication for Ovadia � proof that, where other concepts have failed, his, like his buoys, has stayed afloat. But for the most part he is looking to other markets, focusing on underdeveloped and energy-poor countries in Africa and Asia. It is there that he expects to see his first power plant built � he estimates � within two or three years.

“When I was in Gambia,” he recalls, “we went to visit a little village. At one point our meeting was interrupted by afternoon prayers… There I was, this Israeli Jew, surrounded by Muslims praying intensely.

“These people,” Ovadia says, leaning forward as if to reveal a secret, “are in desperate need of energy in order to improve their lives. Well,” he says, leaning back in his chair again, “I will be their messiah. I will save them.”

By Nicky Blackburn, www.Israel21c.com

For Prof. Beka Solomon it was obvious. If it isn’t possible to send drugs to the brain to treat Alzheimer’s disease the normal way because of the blood-brain barrier that prevents drugs from moving from the blood stream into the brain, then send them through the nose instead.

Solomon, of the Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology Department at Tel Aviv University, has been working in this field for the last 13 years after years of research in immunotherapy, and found in mouse trials that filamentous phages, a harmless bacterial virus found almost everywhere from the depths of the ocean to the lining of the stomach, can be an effective treatment against Alzheimer’s disease when carried to the brain through the nose.

Alzheimer’s is a debilitating disease that leads to progressive loss of memory and cognitive functions, and a great deal of suffering for both the person afflicted and their loved ones. In the U.S. alone, there are now more than five million people living with Alzheimer’s, but there is currently no drug on the market that can cure or effectively stop the progression of this disease.

The cause of this disease and other neurological diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is widely concluded to be plaque formation, which causes inflammation in the brain. Up to now, scientists working on a cure for the disease have focused on dissolving and preventing plaque formation, but most have come up against two problems: firstly, the difficulty in developing drugs that pass through the highly selective blood-brain barrier; and secondly, unwanted side-effects of inflammation and hemorrhaging.

In her research, Solomon shows that by administering non-lytic filamentous phages in small doses through the nasal passages, the phages have a direct and rapid route to the brain. There they lock onto the extracellular plaques associated with Alzheimer’s and dissolve them, reducing inflammation in the brain without any side effects. The body then gets rid of the waste naturally.

“The filamentous phages have a nanotubular appearance which is very similar in shape to amyloid fibrils, the main component of amyloid plaque, which is the plaque linked to Alzheimer’s,” explains Solomon, who recently presented her findings at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Canada.

Solomon first began thinking about sending phages through the nasal passages because the plaque that causes Alzheimer’s first appears in the olfactory bulb. As a result, one of the early symptoms of this devastating disease is loss of smell.

To test her hypothesis, Solomon and her colleagues treated 150 mice with the phage intranasally for 12 months. They found the mice that had exhibited the symptoms of Alzheimer’s regained their sense of smell and also showed memory and cognitive improvement. After one year of treatment, they had 80 percent fewer plaques than untreated mice.

The phages were eliminated from the brain and secreted from the body in urine and feces. The researchers saw no adverse effects in the peripheral organs — the kidneys, liver, lungs, and spleen biology were all normal.

“The mice showed very nice recovery of their cognitive function,” says Solomon, who emigrated with her family from Romania to Israel about 40 years ago. “We saw a reduction in the amyloid plaque and a reduction in brain inflammation. Afterward the phages were eliminated naturally from the body through the kidneys without any adverse side-effects.”

“This is a potential breakthrough, but it needs to be proved further,” Solomon told ISRAEL21c. “Bateriophages are one of the most numerous life forms on earth and mammalian organisms are very frequently exposed to interactions with them. We know for instance that they are a very important part of the natural flora of the gut and research groups all over the world have developed classic phage therapy as an alternative to antibiotics. We are used to living with them, it’s not unusual, but to take them to the brain in unusual. This is the first attempt to use phages as a treatment for Alzheimer’s.”

Ramot, the commercial arm of Tel Aviv University is now planning to commercialize Solomon’s research and has licensed the technology to a startup company.

“Beka is a real pioneer in developing an immunotherapeutic approach for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease,” says Irit Ben-Chlouch, director of business development, life sciences at Ramot. “She was the first to show the disease can be treated using antibodies and, as the main focus of her lab, has developed several different breakthrough approaches.”

In the meantime, Solomon plans to continue with her research, which she regards as a platform technology. She and fellow researchers at the university are now exploring whether this intranasal administration of filamentous phages can also be used to help patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease and Huntingdon’s disease.

She is also exploring the possibility of adding medicines, such as anti-inflammation agents to the phages, to bring the brain additional therapeutic medicines.

By Judy Siegel-Itzkovich , www.JPost.com

If you “sleep on it” by taking a daytime siesta, you may find that the nap speeds up the consolidation of your long-term memory, according to new research conducted at the University of Haifa’s Center for Brain and Behavior Research.

A 90-minute nap during the day is enough to quicken the storage of long-term memory, said Prof. Avi Karni and Dr. Maria Korman, who have just published their research in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience.

“We still don’t know the exact mechanism of the memory process that occurs during sleep, but the results of this research suggest the possibility that it is possible to speed up memory consolidation, and in the future we may be able to do it artificially,” said Karni.

Long-term memory doesn’t disappear for many years or perhaps at all. It is divided into two types: memories of “what” (for example, what happened yesterday or what one remembers from an article you read yesterday) and memories of “how to” (for example: how to read Hebrew, drive, play basketball or play the piano).

In this new research, which was conducted in cooperation with the Sheba Medical Center’s sleep lab and psychology researchers at the University of Montreal, it was revealed that a daytime nap changes the course of memory consolidation in the brain. Two groups of participants practiced a repeated motor activity that consisted of bringing the thumb and a finger together in a specific sequence. The research examined the “how to” aspect of memory in the participants’ ability to perform the task quickly and in the correct sequence. One of the groups was allowed to nap for 90 minutes after learning the task, while the other group stayed awake.

The group that slept in the afternoon showed a distinct improvement in their task performance by that evening, as opposed to the awake group, which did not show any improvement. Following a whole night’s sleep, both groups exhibited the same skill level. “This part of the research showed that a daytime nap speeds up performance improvement in the brain. After a night’s sleep, the two groups were at the same level, but the group that slept in the afternoon improved much faster than the group that stayed awake,” Karni said.

A second experiment showed that another aspect of memory consolidation is also accelerated by sleep. It was previously shown that during the six to eight hours after completing an effective practice session, the neural process of “how to” memory consolidation is susceptible to interference, such that if, for example, one learns or performs a second, different task, one’s brain will not be able successfully to remember the first trained task.

A third group of participants in the Haifa study learned a different thumb-to-finger movement sequence two hours after practicing the first task. As the second task was introduced at the beginning of the six-to-eight-hour period during which the brain consolidates memories, the second task disturbed the memory consolidation process, and this group did not show any improvement in their ability to perform the task, neither in the evening of that day nor on the following morning. However, when a fourth group of participants was allowed a 90-minute nap between learning the first set of movements and the second, they did not show much improvement in the evening. The next morning, these participants showed a marked improvement of their performance, as if there had been no interference at all.

“This part of the study demonstrated, for the first time, that daytime sleep can shorten the time in which “how to” memory becomes immune to interference and forgetting. Instead of six to eight hours, the brain consolidated the memory during the 90-minute nap,” said Karni – who added that while this study demonstrates that memory consolidation is accelerated during daytime sleep, it is still unclear which mechanisms sleep accelerates in the process.

Understanding these mechanisms, the researchers said, could enable the development of methods to accelerate memory consolidation in adults and create stable memories within a short time. Until then, if you need to memorize something quickly or if your schedule is filled with different activities that require learning “how to” do things, it is worth finding the time for an afternoon nap.

By Judy Siegel, The Jerusalem Post

Bringing back 3,500 Israeli scientists and researchers and 20,000 hi-tech professionals who have left the country must be an urgent national target, Science and Technology Minister Ghaleb Majadleh said in the Knesset on Monday in a special session of the Knesset Science and Technology Committee.

The session was held to mark the fifth anniversary of the death of Israel’s first astronaut, Col. Ilan Ramon, in the failed Columbia space shuttle mission with colleagues from the US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Two NASA astronauts – Sunita Williams and Michael Lopez-Alegria – were present at the meeting along with European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Gerhard Thiele, NASA scientist Nagin Cox and family members of fallen American astronauts.

NUL-NRP MK Benny Elon asked the astronauts to help Israel in getting another Israeli admitted to the NASA space program.

NASA astronauts flank Science and Technology Minister Ghaleb Majadleh.
Photo: Sasson Tiram

Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik asked what astronauts eat during their flights when they spent half a year or more in a space station. She was told that a supply ship arrives periodically and brings fresh fruit and vegetables, along with other staples. “It is fresh produce that we miss the most,” said Williams.

Thiele disclosed that talks about cooperation between the ESA and the Israel Space Agency were taking place.

Ramon’s widow Rona, who has maintained much interest and links with NASA astronauts, said that the “joint tragedy has turned us into a warm and loving family.”

By ISRAEL 21ST Century, www.Israel21c.com

The devastating Hurricane Katrina may not have been preventable back in 2005, but if a new concept developed in Israel to zap the strength from hurricanes proves functional, it could prevent future natural disasters from wreaking such extensive damage.

According to noted Israeli weather specialist Prof Daniel Rosenfeld of Hebrew University, seeding a hurricane with microscopic dust could sharply reduce its force.

Satellite view of Hurricane Katrina

The findings of his study – which showed that dust dropped into the lower part of Hurricane Katrina would have reduced wind speeds and diverted its course – were presented last month at the European Conference on Severe Storms in Trieste, Italy.

Rosenfeld’s concept, which was developed with several colleagues, builds on empirical research which shows that large dust clouds from Africa tend to hinder the formation deep storm clouds and hinder the formation of hurricanes when tropical systems are crossing the Atlantic.

He showed in computer simulations that sowing tiny moisture-seeking particles into the lower reaches of a hurricane would prevent the formation of rain and reduce temperatures, starving the storm of its source of energy.

The process “creates clouds with a large number of small drops that fall very slowly, floating with air molecules, and are less likely to collide with each other and coalesce into rain drops,” Rosenfeld told AFP.

Rosenfeld first tested his model in a control run in an attempt to recreate the conditions of Katrina, which was successful. When he then factored in the effect of cloud seeding – taking into account the impact of sea spray, which would reduce the desired effect – the radius of hurricane-force winds shrunk by at least 25 percent, with wind speeds reduced throughout the hurricane.

“That would affect mainly the sea surge, which means less rising of the water, which might have made the difference in New Orleans,” Rosenfeld said.

The simulated path of the weakened storm curved north as compared to Katrina, and would have made landfall about 130 miles east of New Orleans.

According to Rosenfeld, it would take five to 10 Lockheed C-130s cargo planes to disperse some 200 tons per hour of particles so small – less than one millionth of a metre across – that they would be emitted in the form of smoke. The planes would be hundreds of miles from the eye of the hurricane.

Trying to extend the practice of cloud seeding – commonly used both to make or impede precipitation – to hurricanes, has been a scientific endeavor since the 1960s, when the US government ran a series of experiments called ‘Stormfury’ that attempted to decrease hurricane force by artificially stimulating convection – the vertical transfer of heat and moisture – outside the wall which encases the eye of the storm. The idea, which was abandoned after four tests, was to expand the size of the eye, typically 10 to 40 miles in diameter, and thus slow the destructive winds that swirl around the eyewall.

“I tried to fix some of the problems that prevented Stormfury from working,” he said, adding that he was inspired ain after observing that smoke from forest fires can prevent warm rain from tropical clouds.

Rosenfeld, who has won many awards for his work, including the Schaefer and Thunderbird awards from the Weather Modification Association and the Verner Suomi Medal of the American Meteorological Society, has been studying this field for many years. In 2000 he used satellite data to show that urban pollution was reducing the size of water droplets inside clouds and proposed that this would reduce precipitation from short-lived clouds in hilly regions.

In a follow-up study carried out with Chinese researchers, Rosenfeld discovered that airborne particulate pollution from China’s factories and vehicles is seriously reducing rainfall in hilly areas of the country, a phenomenon that will have dire consequences for water resources.

By Julie Stahl, Cybercast News Service Jerusalem Bureau Chief

Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) – Some Israeli lawmakers are seizing on archeology as a way to fight Prime Minister Olmert’s apparent plan to divide the city of Jerusalem.

The Knesset members see archeological digs as the best way to illustrate the link between the Jewish people, Jerusalem and the Land of Israel — and to mobilize public opinion against the division of Jerusalem.

The revival of the archeology lobby in the last few weeks comes ahead of the U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian summit, which is supposed to take place in Annapolis, Maryland, before the end of the year.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has indicated that he is willing to divide Jerusalem, keeping Jewish neighborhoods under Israeli control and giving Arab neighborhoods to the control of a future Palestinian state.

The archeology lobby wants to steer Israeli citizens against the idea, said Yigal Amitay, a spokesman for Knesset Member Uri Ariel of the rightwing National Union/National Religious Party.

In almost every place where archeological digging is taking place throughout Israel, archeologists are uncovering Jewish artifacts and history. But there is no place in the entire country where Palestinian history is unearthed, said Amitay.

The more archeological artifacts that are uncovered, Amitay said, the harder it will be for Olmert to gain Jewish support for making a deal on Jerusalem, he said.

Ten of the 13 lobby members toured archeological sites in and around the ancient Old City of Jerusalem.

Outside the Old City, the lawmakers visited the two-month-old excavation of Jerusalem’s ancient water system. The system was not only used to carry away rainwater. According to the writings of Josephus Flavius, it also was a hiding place and escape route for Jews fleeing the Roman destruction of the city around 70 A.D, said archeologist Eli Shukron. [see related story, Dec �06 Levitt Letter, pg. 11]

Inside the Old City, opposite the Western Wall, the Knesset members visited one of the largest excavations carried out by the official Israel Antiquities Authority in the last 20 years. The excavation dates to the Roman colonization of Jerusalem (70-292 A.D.), said IAA Archeologist Jon Seligman.

Rabbi Nissim Ze’ev from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, which is currently a coalition partner in Olmert’s government, said the stones themselves “testify to the history of the Jewish people in this place.”

“The Jewish people were here a long time before the Palestinians arrived,” Ze’ev told Cybercast News Service. But that is not the way that the Palestinians want to view it. They insist that the Jews arrived in 1948 when the State of Israel was created, he said.

Palestinian officials, starting with former PLO leader Yasser Arafat, have claimed that Jewish Temples never stood on the Temple Mount. In fact, two successive Jewish temples were located there before and during the time of Jesus.

Palestinian denials are seen by many people as an attempt to de-legitimize Israel’s right to exist. If the Jewish people have no historical connection to the land, then there would have been no reason to establish a Jewish state here, the argument goes.

Archeologists also have criticized the Israeli government for failing to stop renovations by Islamic religious authorities on the Temple Mount. They say the renovations have led to the destruction of countless antiquities.

The lawmakers’ visit to the Old City digs “has everything to do with Annapolis and nothing to do with Annapolis,” said Knesset member Arieh Eldad, a member of the rightwing National Union/National Religious Party.

“We step on remains of more than 4,000 years of our history. My ability to be part of the Jewish nation is based on the stones that we step on,” said Eldad. Olmert has no mandate to give up Jerusalem in the name of the Jewish people, he said.

“The U.S. is making a huge mistake because they are trying to push a very short-sighted political achievement when they try to press Israel to [make] concessions in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria [West Bank],” said Eldad.

If Israel turns over more land in the West Bank, it will lead to the creation of a second Hamas state there, he warned.

Eldad charged that Israel should not listen to the advice of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, since she has twice pressured Israel into making concessions that turned out to be disastrous.

When she was National Security Advisor, Rice pressed Israel to allow Hamas to take part in Palestinian elections. Hamas won a stunning victory (and eventually took over the Gaza Strip).

Rice also was the key player in drafting an agreement that forced Israel to pull out of the Rafah passage between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. That has led to massive smuggling of weapons, explosives and Iranian training and know-how into the Gaza Strip, Israeli military officials say.

“Her previous advice in this area [was] a fiasco,” said Eldad. “Why should we listen this time?”

By Nicky Blackburn, www.Israel21c.com

The best thing to do if you suffer peripheral arterial disease (PAD), a chronic condition that happens when a plaque blockage occurs in a peripheral artery in the legs or pelvis, is to walk. Walk, and walk, and walk. The act of walking enlarges and expands the small blood vessels around the artery, ensuring that you receive a steady flow of blood to the lower extremities despite the plaque blockage.

For some patients with PAD, however, walking just isn’t possible. Perhaps they have an injury or swelling, perhaps they are elderly or diabetic. The upshot is that oxygen-rich blood does not reach the lower limbs. This causes pain, changes in skin color, ulcers and difficulty in walking. But if the plaque blockage — made of fats and cholesterol — grows large enough to completely block the artery or ruptures to form a blood clot, the result is a total loss of circulation to the legs and feet, which can cause gangrene and amputation.

Nearly 12 million Americans now suffer from PAD, and experts predict this number will rise to 19 million. While there are existing treatments including angioplasty, atherectomy, or bypass for some of these people, for the 750,000 patients whose condition has deteriorated into critical limb ischemia (CLI), there is no existing therapy. These ‘no-option’ patients are not candidates for conventional treatments, have an alarming mortality rate, and face imminent amputation. Every year in America some 187,000 no-option patients undergo amputation of a lower limb.

Now Israeli start-up PerAssist has developed a new treatment that may give these no-option patients a chance to save their limbs. The company’s innovative peri-arterial booster device called PeriBoost improves blood flow to the lower limbs of PAD patients in much the same way that walking does.

A PeriBoost sleeve is fitted around a major, intact, healthy blood vessel — usually the femoral or iliac arteries — near the diseased peripheral region using a minimally invasive laparoscopic procedure. A balloon is then inserted between the artery and the sleeve, and is held in place by the sleeve. The balloon is inflated and deflated in synchronization with the patient’s heart beat. An external control device includes an ECG.

The PeriBoost enlarges and expands the small blood vessels around the artery, ensuring that you receive a steady flow of blood to the lower extremities despite the plaque blockage.

This pumping action squeezes the blood downstream, ensuring that blood flow in the artery is maximized. By doing this it enlarges the small arteries around the blockage, bringing more blood down to the lower limbs.

“We aren’t treating the block,” says Roni Bibi, the CEO of PerAssist, “We are bringing more blood downstream, enlarging the velocity and flow to the small arteries by about 90 percent, to recover the leg and avoid amputation.”

The treatment, which has not yet undergone clinical trials and is designed for the legs only, is designed to be carried out daily for three hours over three months. It is not painful, according to Bibi, and the patient can function normally throughout the procedure.

“The blood vessel is not like a muscle, it has no sensors or nerves. All we are doing is pushing it and this does not cause any pain,” Bibi tells ISRAEL21c. “The patient can eat, sleep, read – whatever they want. They won’t feel a thing.”

PeriBoost compares well to existing treatments. For example, it does not require arteries to be incised or perforated, and therefore does not damage artery walls. In one treatment, a doctor will drill inside the artery, remove the blockage and clean the artery from the inside. This is major invasive surgery, can only be carried out in the upper leg, and often ends up as nothing more than temporary relief as the same area becomes quickly blocked again. Stents and bypass surgery are also significant surgical events, and very problematic for the elderly or diabetic.

PeriBoost is likely to be much cheaper than any of these existing treatments, and it can be left in place for future use if peripheral vessels become re-occluded. The only main drawback to PeriBoost is that treatment is slow — three months, rather than a few days of recovery after one surgery.

The idea for PeriBoost came from Dr. Aaron Hoffman, the company’s chief medical officer and director of the department of vascular surgery and transplantation at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, and a friend of his, water engineer, Gaby Weizman. Hoffman, who is also an associate professor at the faculty of medicine at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and has been involved in cutting-edge vascular medicine for over 20 years, recognized the problems in this field for no-option patients and turned to his friend to see if they could come up with a joint solution. In 2005 PerAssist was set up at the Misgav Venture Accelerator. Bibi joined the company as its CEO.

In the last two years the company has taken its device through successful animal trials. “It was the first medical device proven to increase the Ankle Brachial Index [ABI the golden standard for PAD diagnosis] on a large animal model,” says Bibi.

The company now plans to raise an additional investment of $1.5 million to fund it through clinical trials, which are expected to be held in Switzerland, Germany and Italy. The company aims to receive CE approval in the first stage, and afterwards look for FDA approval. If all goes according to plan, the product could be out in the European market by the end of next year, and in the US in 2009.

“This is a good project and it can help a lot of people,” says Bibi. “For so many patients there is no solution today except amputation. We are holding out the promise of an alternative.”