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Cannabis has become an integral part of pain medicine despite a lack of clear evidence to support its use, an expert said at the 2021 virtual American Academy of Pain Medicine meeting. Some patients with chronic pain clearly benefit from medical cannabis, said Elon Eisenberg, MD, of Rambam Health Care and the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, in a special session about cannabis.
The endo-cannabinoid system is involved in pain control at the peripheral, spinal, and supra-spinal levels, Eisenberg observed. Cannabinoid receptor activity inhibits the ascending nociceptive transmission, activates the inhibitory descending pathways, and modifies the emotional component of pain which is important by itself.
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Apr. 29, 2021 2:32 AM
Michal Mor, a psychologist by training, says it all began in the Second Lebanon War. “My husband got a call-up order, they handed him an M-16 and he went into Lebanon with a gun and a steel gunsite. It was terrible. At the end of the day, the reserve soldier is the mainstay of the army and he needs to regain his operational capabilities, which takes time he doesn’t have.”
In those days Mor was developing a sophisticated system capable of ensuring that a missile, as she put it, “can enter through the left-hand window on the third floor of a particular building.
Three sperm whale calves. (Amanda Cotton)
Five Israelis have been invited to join a pioneering global research project aimed at listening into and understanding the language of sperm whales, the animals with the biggest brains on the planet.
Project CETI Cetacean Translation Initiative forms part of TED’s Audacious Project program, which annually selects what it calls “big, bold solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges.”
CETI seeks to provide the first-ever blueprint of another animal’s language and maybe even to enable humans to communicate with these great mammals, which are ranked as vulnerable worldwide by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and as endangered in the US and the Mediterranean.
Shoshanna Solomon is The Times of Israel s Startups and Business reporter
A sign for The Blackstone Group L.P. investment firm in front of its offices, October 15, 2018, in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
Blackstone, a New York City-based investment giant that manages $649 billion in assets, is setting up an office in Tel Aviv to tap into the nation’s growing tech firms.
The office will be run by Yifat Oron, the former CEO of LeumiTech, the tech banking arm of Bank Leumi Le-Israel. As senior managing director and head of Blackstone’s office, Oron will set up a team to vet companies for investment from the US firm’s recently raised, inaugural $4.5 billion growth equity fund Blackstone Growth (BXG).
Aseel Nama, an undergraduate student in Technion’s biomedical engineering department, participated in a NASA-led month-long asteroid hunting campaign.
Two newly found asteroids will be named after an Israeli student at Technion Israel Institute of Technology, according to a press release from the university.
Aseel Nama, an undergraduate student in Technion’s biomedical engineering department, participated in a NASA-led month-long asteroid hunting campaign, a competition where teams of “citizen scientists” can enter and parse astronomical data. Nama was the only competitor to participate alone, and the only Israeli out of 116 teams worldwide.
“I really wanted to take part in this campaign,” Nama said, “but NASA insisted that I recruit a team of three people. I explained that I wasn’t able to recruit anyone else, but that this is my dream.” Eventually, NASA agreed.