Israel, with the highest proportion of citizens vaccinated against Covid-19 in the world, found it took three weeks for the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE shot to start curbing new cases and hospitalizations.
Illustrative image: a robot surveys mathematical calculations (PhonlamaiPhoto via iStock by Getty Images)
Israel has a smart new mathematician, throwing out mind-teasing hypotheses for number-crunchers of the world to prove or disprove. The powers being displayed are, literally, superhuman, because it is a multi-tentacled computer program.
The Ramanujan Machine, an advanced artificial intelligence invention, works across ten regular computers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, churning through possibilities for new lines of mathematical research. And in the future, scientists hope it may use your phone’s processing power too.
For almost two years, Prof. Ido Kaminer, who built the device, has been gathering all the hypotheses it came up with, and on Wednesday he published the 19 hardest to prove or disprove in the influential peer-reviewed journal Nature, inviting experts all over the world to take to their whiteboards and have a try.
Technion to award Pfizer CEO honorary doctorate for coronavirus vaccine
Technion to award Pfizer CEO honorary doctorate for coronavirus vaccine
“This is an emotional closure for me,” says Albert Bourla, the son of Holocaust survivors from Thessaloniki.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. Source: Twitter.
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(February 3, 2021 / Israel Hayom) The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology will award an honorary doctorate to Pfizer CEO and chairman Dr. Albert Bourla for his “extraordinary achievement” in leading the record-time development of a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, Technion president Professor Uri Sivan announced this month.
“Dr. Bourla headed the trailblazing effort to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus,” said Sivan. “In his 27 years with Pfizer, Dr. Bourla promoted multiple areas within the company, among them technological innovation,” said Sivan. “[His] family history, as a son of Holocaust survivors from Thessaloniki, is a symbol of the remark
To increase your wellbeing, try touching and sniffing plants
Study shows close interaction with nature has more tangible benefits for lifting spirits, and that you don’t have to turn off your phone to do so.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
If you too have been devoting recent lockdowns to home gardening to lift your spirits, you’ll be happy to hear that science is on your side: Recent research shows that for greenery to have tangible benefits for your mood, you need to closely interact with it.
In a study published in
Conservation Biology, researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa showed that closeness to nature improves wellbeing more than passive exposure or simply looking at a green landscape.
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Medical teams team wearing safety gear as they work in the coronavirus ward of Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospitall in Jerusalem on February 1, 2021(. Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)
A military task force advising the Health Ministry cautioned Tuesday that coronavirus infection may be on the rise again, even after a month of lockdown, as a health official said the current closure may not be Israel’s last.
“Morbidity is continuing at very high rates, and it is possible that it is starting to rise again,” the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate task force wrote in a report. It noted that the weeks of lockdown have yet to cause a drop in the test positivity rate or in the number of serious patients.