With funds from 21 donors all over the world, the project to renew the Israel Museum is by far the largest collective philanthropic effort ever undertaken for a single cultural institution in the country. But the work poured into the renewal of the institution didn’t simply stop at funding. Architectural firms in both New York and Tel Aviv worked together to bring new life into the building. James Carpenter Design Associates of New York designed the new building to resonate with the original modernist geometric plan laid out by Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad.

The new design offers a way for visitors to navigate intuitively through the museum’s various offerings. Among these are a chronological presentation of archeological holdings from the land of Israel, the first permanent galleries for Israeli art, and a newly configured Synagogue Route.

This Synagogue Route is one of the newest features of the institution, recreating four original synagogue interiors from Italy, Germany, India and Suriname. The Suriname synagogue exhibit has been made into the highlight of the newly installed Mandel Wing for Jewish Art and Life.

Among museum director James Synder’s goals for the institution include broadening its appeal as an international cross-cultural center. Seeing how donors from all over the world collaborated to bring this project to life, Synder is on his way to fulfilling that goal. As one of the seats of world religion, preserving and displaying the richness of Israel’s history is a task worth taking and it’s satisfying to see how people around the world have contributed to preserve the heritage of one culture.

To bring about this innovative device, Prof. Sobel and his team found a close link between the skill of sniffing and the braincase. Specifically, it is because sniffing is a motor skill controlled in part by the soft palate, which moves to direct air in or out through the nose or mouth. The soft palate then is controlled by several nerves that connect it straight through the braincase. The team’s theory then was that this motor skill might still be preserved even in the most acute cases of paralysis.

Their further findings also showed a link between a number of brain areas and soft palate control. This included a significant overlap between soft palate control and the language areas of the brain, which hinted to the use of sniffing to communicate.

In initial tests, both with healthy volunteers and the severely disabled, the device worked favorably. One of the most stirring results came from a test with patients with unimpaired cognitive functions but were completely paralyzed, thus ‘locked into’ their bodies. In the test, these patients found themselves able to communicate with the world and with their family, sharing thoughts and feelings after a long time of not being able to do so.

So far, this device that the disabled has found to be simple to learn has also been found relatively inexpensive to produce. Currently, Yeda Research and Development Company, the Weizmann’s technology transfer arm, is exploring the possibility of commercializing the device.

This amazing discovery is a breakthrough that can’t be ignored. As some have found that this device is more accurate than one controlled by blinking, I feel that researchers, scientists and technology developers are on their way to creating better methods for the severely disabled to reconnect with the world. It would allow great minds to flourish despite of acute paralysis.

The goal of the treatment is to lower the patient’s body temperature to about six degrees for 24 hours. “We know that cooling your body’s temperature slows everything down,” said Salvatore J. Cassano, the city fire commissioner. “It brings your body out of that panic mode, and it actually reduces your body’s need for blood. That buys us time.”

Since January 2009, about 20 city hospitals have begun to make use of this as a part of a project organized by the city’s Emergency Medical Service and the Greater New York Hospital Association. The therapy is administered through various means including the use of cold packs or injections of chilled saline solution into the vein or bone.

Now, the number of hospitals has grown to 43 out of the 50 hospitals participating in the 911 emergency system. Also, since the pilot project’s beginning, the survival rate for the patients that were taken in has increased 20 percent as compared with 2008.

Now that the project has entered its second phase, paramedics are being trained to administer this cooling therapy to better improve cardiac arrest survival in patients. This would play an important part in improving the survival of patients as city paramedics respond to about 15,000 calls per year from people suffering from heart attack syndromes. Half of these result in cardiac arrest, according to the city’s Fire Department officials.

So far, things have been looking up for the participating hospitals, who are “extremely encouraged” by the results. Although New York is not the only city to implement this treatment as part of standard procedure, it is one of the major ones that could launch the popularity of cooling therapy to the rest of the country and, perhaps, eventually the entire healthcare industry.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest atom smasher and CERN’s most famous pet project. Thanks to popular books and the media, it has roused the people’s curiosity and seeped into popular culture as the ultimate hybrid of science fiction and science fact. In just a few months, the powerful particle accelerator was able to replicate every single particle currently known to physics. The next step, according to the people behind the project, is to make over our knowledge of physics itself.

CERN is not the only entity on the hunt for the God particle. Two rival projects, the Compact Linear Collider (CLC) and the International Linear Collider (ILC), are also dabbling with high energy physics, albeit using very different means. Whereas the LHC consists of a giant vacuum ring, which recreates microscopic “big bangs” by smashing together sub-atomic particles at high energy levels, the ILC and CLC smashes particles together in straight lines of up to 50 km.

It’s been a long time coming, and now CERN is finally ready to achieve what most people consider to be the main purpose of its existence. The discovery of the Higgs Boson might just change the course of history. The better we understand the God particle and its role in the Big Bang, the better we’ll be able to control our environment and make the best out of the universe that we live in, whether in the search for a new source of renewable energy or, as some science fictionists speculate, in time travel.

Made entirely out of recycled materials, the Plastiki’s voyage served to highlight the benefits of recycling. On its website, ThePlastiki.com, visitors were asked to pledge their support for beating waste, putting up the marker at 12,500, which is the exact number of 2-liter plastic bottles used to provide buoyancy to the boat.

It wasn’t just the boat that consisted of environment friendly products. A host of green gadgets accompanied the crew during its voyage. The boat was fueled by flexible solar panels and wind turbines. It also housed a vacuum water evaporator for desalination and a urine-to-water recovery system.

Throughout its journey, Rothschild and the boat’s crew continually posted updates on their blog and various social media sites, drawing hundreds of people to its cause. During the past 130 days, the crew got its fair share of exciting moments, including a violent wind storm that gusted at 63 knots and threatened to blow the boat off course.

David de Rothschild also runs Adventure Ecology, an educational organization that also aims to spread environmental awareness. He believes the Plastiki’s trans-Pacific voyage can open people’s eyes to the wonders of recycling. Indeed, who would ever think that a vessel that is made from recycled plastic and aluminum, and glued together using organic glue made from cashews and sugar cane, would withstand a strong wind storm in the high seas? The inspiration for the Plastiki was drawn from Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 expedition aboard the Kon-Tiki, a vessel made as a reproduction of an Incan raft. Heyerdahl’s grandson Olav Heyerdahl, was part of the Plastiki’s crew.

More than anything, I think that the project is about ambition and ingenuity. In an environmentally friendly way, it proves that great things can be done with enough hard work and innovation, even when materials are limited.

A program by Tel Aviv-based Soluto targets a widespread source of frustration – computer boot-up time – and earned a TechCrunch Disrupt award in the process. “We are working to solve one of the biggest problems in modern life – the frustration users feel every time they switch on their PC and wait for it to load,” shares Soluto Chief Product Officer Roee Adler. “And when you’re talking about 1.5 billion people, you can appreciate and understand how we won TechCrunch.”

Representing the firm’s lead product, Soluto’s program is a software download that examines a PC’s boot problems and suggests ways to make the boot-up process work more smoothly. Adler elaborates, “Our software analyzes the interactivity between applications and processes, delving deep into the Windows kernel, and informs you of what’s going on behind the scenes. You can determine which processes or applications are slowing you down, and take the appropriate action.”

The results are highly encouraging – informal tests show that Soluto’s software may be able to cut boot time by as much as half of the norm.

Soluto was founded in 2007, and to date has about $8 million in financing from investors like Proxima Investments, Giza Venture Capital and Bessemer Investments, among others. It is, however, interesting to note that the company won over some very strong competitors. This illustrates just how high the need for something like Soluto’s program really is.

At the end of it all, technology is meant to improve peoples’ quality of life. Annoyance at boot times that may reach a minute or more is definitely not a boon that technology brings. Soluto’s award-winning program once again shows that if a startup thinks out of the box and looks at issues at ground level, success is practically sure to follow.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about Startups.

In the Commodities Corner of Marketwatch, journalist Myra P. Saefong has shown today that the strategy is working. Seeking to “cut back on exploration and postpone new projects is finally starting to show signs of success as demand for the commodity begins to improve,” which is good news for both the industry and for the general health of the energy markets.

I think natural gas will be a huge place of growth while we wait for solar, wind, and other alternative energy forms to gain a foothold in the global market. Until then, it’s certainly the more sustainable option, and is already used in millions of homes the world over.

At the same time, this shift in production should be a good thing over the long term, saving resources for when they are more urgently needed in the future. According to Ben Smith of First Enercast Financial, an information vendor catering to energy markets, ” Today, there are half the rigs searching for natural gas in the U.S. than there were last year,” a trend which is sure to continue until prices regain their old levels.

[image via Mountain Madman]

Here are a few telling statistics to come out of the report, which captures data beginning in 2006 through the end of 2008:

- Venture-backed companies now account for 12 million jobs and 21% of GDP

- 81% of the software industry’s 1 million jobs originate from venture-backed startups

- Over that time, venture-backed business showed 1.6% job growth in the private sector vs. 0.2% in the industry as a whole

The full details of the report can be found here. I highly suggest spending some time with this document as it does a nice job of framing not only the financial ramifications that VCs have on fledgling businesses, but the culture that they can help to create during early stage growth. This guidance and development of best practices won’t show up on any balance sheets, but can certainly make the difference between success and failure.

NVCA Venture Impact 5th Ed

[image via Mark Coggins]

Seth Godin refers to this situation as a “surplus of attention,” a reversal of the previous trend that saw marketers buying up ad space wherever they could and at premium prices because there was only so much that people were looking at and it typically translated into increased profits for everyone.

Now we’re looking at a situation where there’s so much real estate that the options of where to try and capture an audience are almost too vast. Advertisers don’t know how to handle so many choices to leverage this situation and therefore are missing out on our collective time spent online. Godin sees the solution as “hyperlocal, hyperspecialized, hyperrelevant,” as the direction we need to be heading.

And while this trend, is more geared towards marketers, I see parallels within the business world, particularly when looking at new tech start-ups because this is the landscape that they will be navigating. Understanding the demands of the your potential customer in any environment, but especially online will have a huge impact on the success of your offering, whether product or service.

[image via katielips]

Inspired by Cisco CEO John Chambers and to support this effort, Donahoe has been personally visiting many of eBay’s strongest sellers, interviewing them using little more than a Flip video camera and his own questions. He has called the process “eye-opening,” saying “it’s incredible how they make a business out of nothing, really. They find inefficiencies in the supply chain and are able to create businesses around them.”

The kind of business 101 that you wouldn’t expect a successful CEO to need, but this feedback has taught him how to make improvements in the eBay operation. Insights that he has gladly shared with his own employees. While he might not be the first corporate decision maker to undertake this kind of first person fieldwork, it’s still stands as a powerful example of what getting back to your roots can bring to your company at any stage.

[image via Aaron Escobar]