The winner of FeyLab 2012 Yael Grossman

Grossman, who is studying for a master's degree at Tel Aviv University, lectured on works composed by a computer * In second place Shahar Meidenbaum and third: Benny Zhitomirsky

How do topics such as "the benefits of secretions", "building materials" and "the hormone oxytocin" become popular and interesting topics even for those who do not have a scientific education? This is the challenge that ten contestants tried to face yesterday, May 23, 2012, in the final stage of the "Faymlab" competition.

The "Faymlab" competition is being held for the sixth year at the initiative of the British Council in Israel, and this year also in collaboration with the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Hamada Association. Contestants in the competition are required to present a scientific topic in three minutes in an exciting, precise and clear manner without aids or presentations. The judges for the competition this time were Dr. Judith Richter, CEO of Medinol - the manufacturer of arterial stents, Prof. Raz Yelink, a researcher in the chemistry department at Ben Gurion and an expert in biomimetics and nanotechnology, the director and acting teacher Dorona Ben Dor, and the journalist and author Lehi Lapid.

The competition is looking for the new face of science communication and aims to encourage and train young scientists to integrate communication with the general public in their scientific-technological career. The competition was founded eight years ago as part of the Cheltenham Science Festival in Great Britain and was adopted as an international project by the British Council. This year the competition is held in 19 countries around the world.

The contestant who met the challenge in the best way and won first place is doctoral student Yael Grossman, a student for a master's degree in computer engineering at Tel Aviv University. Grossman spoke about the question of whether a piece of classical music composed by a computer is considered a work at all and the differences between works composed by humans and those created by a computer.

Yael Grossman - a master's degree student in computer science at Tel Aviv University and a specialist in data processing spoke about creativity between man and machine and played a piece of music at the beginning of her lecture. "The melody was composed by a software called Emily. A computer program of a researcher at the University of California, who played the pieces and the listeners could not distinguish between the computer composer and the human composer. If you chat with someone you don't know and at the end of the conversation you are surprised to hear that the person on the other end is not a person. Alan Turing - the father of computer science, stated that if a person interacts with a computer program and does not know that it is a human being, according to this principle the computer is intelligent. Emily may be intelligent. is that so?

Emily contains a database of thousands of works that the research broke down into parts and also formulated the language used and with which they differentiate between a musical piece and a non-musical piece, the way to perform repetitions and improvisations on a theme, and more. Just putting together parts of what is already in her database, real composers write from emotion. Emily's key claims differently that Mozart and Beethoven also drew from things that came to them in their heads and from the sounds of nature, and the real genius is in being able to combine this into a new work. Who says Emily isn't at least as creative as the computer in our head?

Second place went to Shahar Meidenbaum, a doctoral student in computer science and neurology at the Hebrew University who spoke about "how the blind can be taught to see through hearing".

Shahar Meidenbaum, PhD student in computer science and neurobiology in Jerusalem, a researcher of sensory transformations, presented the subject of seeing through the ears: "See in your mind's eye a sight you love, now imagine that it is taken away from you forever. Blindness is one of the scariest things that can happen after a century when the number of blind people decreased, it is increasing again due to diseases such as diabetes. Our lab approaches it in a different way. We are not trying to fix their eyes. The person sees through the eyes, the information undergoes initial processing and is transferred to the brain where the processing is done. Our brains are more talented than they should be. We do sensory transduction. Information that normally comes to the brain through one sense and comes through another sense. The blind person takes glasses with a camera and a computer on them that turns the image into sound, the brain turns the sound into an image and the subject sees.
It's an unpleasant sound that interferes with hearing, requires weeks of training, but it's better than nothing. The feeling that a person born blind can see where her child is looking. A man who became blind at a late age who suddenly sees the view from the window that he has not seen for ten years. This is just an example of what your brain can do."

Third place went to Benny Zhitomirsky, a master's degree student in biology from the Technion who spoke about the resistance of cancer cells to chemotherapy and how research is trying to overcome the problem.

Benny Zhitomirski, a graduate student in the Faculty of Biology at the Technion, researches mechanisms of resistance of cancer cells to chemotherapy and talked about successes and challenges in curing cancer: "Until a few years ago, if a person heard from the doctor that you had cancer, it was seen as a death sentence. Today, thanks to improvements in diagnosis and treatment, we can detect cancer faster and more easily. Every cancer starts with one cell in our body that has gone crazy and divides continuously and uncontrollably. The uncontrolled division creates a fence that damages the tissue in which it is located and even sends metastases to the body."
"One of the factors to deal with cancer - chemotherapy. The patient receives drugs whose job it is to kill the cancer cells. One of the challenges is characterized by a story that repeats itself too many times, a patient is diagnosed with cancer, and he undergoes chemotherapy, the tumor looks as if it is going away, and suddenly it returns and then the previous treatment and no other chemotherapy drug help."

"There are several mechanisms for multidrug resistance - proteins that pump out the drug, but also create bubbles in the space between two cancer cells and pump the drug into these bubbles. Then the idea came up if we could make the cells introduce another substance into the bubbles that, when it reaches a critical level, will cause the bubbles to explode and destroy the cells. "

Miko Rotem, a master's degree student in the Department of Ecology at the Hebrew University who researches the field of evolution and behavior and at the Center for the Study of Rationality under the direction of Avi Shamid told about an incident in an orchid, a bee and a deception.
In Mount Meron, there is a three-way interaction between bees, the Marvinian Lotem plant and the forest orchid. The flowers of the lotus offer a lot of pollen for the bees that feed the offspring and also pollinate the plants, but the orchid is deceptive - it imitates the flowers of the lotus with the white background and the yellow spot in the center. The bees make a mistake and come to the orchid flowers, stick to the pollen, but cannot eat it, and pollinate the next deceptive flower they come across, without being satisfied with the nectar

In game theory, equilibrium in a stable system is defined as a place where everyone maximizes their utility. Equilibrium is the holy grail of game theorists. The orchid maximizes the benefit - receives visits, although not many but enough to pollinate, the bees gain or at least don't lose much because they leave relatively quickly to harvest. When the bees notice that they are romo, they show loyalty to the flowers of the lotus, and this is his profit.

Yonatan Raks, a graduate student at the Technion in building engineering who specializes in building materials, tried to explain the truth, if there is any, behind the claim of the companies that manufacture radiation testing systems, that it is forbidden to sleep in the MMD. "In 2002, a study by the Home Front Command found that a dangerous level of radon gas was accumulating in the closed MMD. Companies immediately popped up and offered expensive tests. After a few years, the companies suggested that it is forbidden to sleep in the dimension. My sister lives in Metula and said that the children sleep in the dimension. She asked whether to take them out there."

"There is a kernel of truth in the story. Radon is indeed a dangerous, radioactive gas and in high concentrations may be carcinogenic. The first question is how he gets to MMD. It all starts with uranium, which emits, among other things, alpha radiation. The uranium atom emits tiny radiation into the air. But even a single sheet of paper can stop the radiation and it becomes a light element that radiates and in turn becomes a lighter element and thus a chain of 19 elements is formed, the seventh of which is radon. Uranium and the 19 substances exist in very small concentrations in concrete, but the concrete walls stop the radiation. What is different about radon is that it is a gas and we may breathe it and it may break down inside our lungs and cause cancer. But in a ventilated MMD there is no danger of radon. The danger begins when you seal the dimension - you lock the door and the heavy windows and even then it will take 24 hours until enough radon accumulates to endanger us, but by then there will be no one to endanger because eight hours after sealing the oxygen runs out." However, this explanation did not calm Dr. Richter, who says that despite this, she will not let her granddaughters sleep in the dimension.

Karen Cohen, PhD student in cancer research in Tel Aviv. She talked about the quality of the environment inside the cell: we all take care of the environment, we take care to separate waste and recycle plastic bottles, some of us even hug trees. We were taught to think green. But it turns out that we did not invent green thinking - it exists and is implemented in the body. Our body is made up of a hundred trillion cells. We will examine one of them."

Let's dive into one cell in our body. We swim in the fluid of the cell in which swim many evenings of chains like Lego blocks, the proteins. Proteins have many functions. Proteins do not have an eternal life. Damaged proteins that are not cleared will accumulate inside the cell and the cell will die. Nobel laureates Hershko and Cchanover discovered the biggest shredding machine - the proteasome. It breaks down the existing proteins and uses their building blocks to make new proteins.

"Can the mechanism be used to kill cancer cells? Precisely cancer cells that divide like crazy and it is difficult for us to kill them are more sensitive than healthy cells to substances that weaken the proteasome. This is just the beginning of a challenging and exciting new study, and you never know what a child will do.
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Rotem Gor, PhD student in neurobiology at the University of Haifa researches memory and social communication in the laboratory of Dr. Shlomo Wagner. The topic of her lecture is smell and sexual attraction. "It happened to you that you came back from a date and there was no chemistry. What are the things that make us attracted. Appearance and personality play a role. When my dog ​​chooses a bitch to mate with, he doesn't do it because of her beautiful eyes but because of the smell. The perfume industry has been based on the smell of musk for many years - precisely from the musk elk, and precisely women prefer the smell that in nature is used by the male elk."

"There are also repulsive smells - for example a study from the Weizmann Institute that the smell of tears causes a decrease in libido. In another study, the smell emitted by the sweat glands was studied. Under the hands there is a factory for spreading the smell - pheromones that contain amounts of information, what we eat, what the nature of the genes is, are there any diseases. The nose picks up these substances and identifies up to a hundred thousand different smells in 350 receptors. What a rich language can be created from different combinations of 350 letters. From the nose, the information about the smell goes to areas related to emotions in the brain. They let the women smell shirts that men wore for several days and asked them to choose the shirt whose smell they liked the most and then also checked the level of correlation between the women and the chosen men. It turns out that the correlation was positive, although the areas of the brain that help women associate smell with sexual compatibility are still unknown. The next time you meet partners, in addition to attractiveness and personality, if the body odor is pleasant to you, it is a message from the body that the partner is suitable for us."

Vared Shaham, postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Avraham Yaron at the Weizmann Institute, researches the development of the nervous system - bachelor's degree in cell, master's degree in Weizmann in the same laboratory. "Every woman of childbearing age, whether or not she intends to become pregnant, should consume 0.4 grams of folic acid, a recommendation by the FDA from 20 years ago. Folic acid is a type of vitamin B found in green leaves, orange juice and more and is important for basic processes in our body. In the case of the fetus - the central nervous system, the brain and the spinal cord reside in the neural tube that begins as an open canal. For the eyes, the tube does not close properly and may lead to a malformation in the development of the nerves. Daily consumption of folic acid can lower the risk, which affects 300 babies every year."

"The creation of the neural tube is at a stage where we still don't even know that the woman is pregnant. And so they decided that she would always be able to and even enriched the food. But it turns out that excess folic acid also causes malformations. We need to continue researching the development of the fetus, and if we know all the processes that take place in the womb for 9 months, we can prevent birth defects in a smarter way."

Dov Schlisslberg, from Sima Yaron's lab at the Technion spoke about the connection between sex and our gut bacteria: "Bacteria have existed for billions of years and are the first life on Earth. From the moment a baby is born, bacteria cover it and are present in the digestive system, helping us break down the food system, protecting it from bad bacteria and even training the immune system. But are they related to the choice of the spouses. Prof. Eugene Rosenberg from Tel Aviv University and the people of his laboratory took two flies to one group only sugar, and to the other only starch. After a few generations they connected the groups. They recognized that the flies preferred those who ate the same food. They gave the flies antibiotics and some of them brought back one of the types of bacteria and then they saw that when the flies had no bacteria in their bodies the preference disappeared. In another study, Prof. Boaz Yuval from the Department of Agriculture examined bacteria in sterilized butterflies that were returned to nature to mate with the flies and make the eggs sterile. It turns out that one of the side effects of these flies is that their sexual activity is affected. As Prof. Yuval and the people of his laboratory who gave them back the missing bacteria, they got their sexual ability back."

Omer Elam, doctoral student in computational biology at Tel Aviv University: "I remember very well the time when I started my doctorate and was looking for a topic to research. I would get up in the morning looking in the mirror fixing my hair and reading articles trying to find a topic that interests me. Until I stopped and came across one article that I realized that every time I look it's 10% Omar and 90% bacteria. There are 10 bacterial cells on each cell and they are very important and do wonderful work."

"The connection between bacteria and obesity was proven in an experiment done in 2006 at the University of Washington. Researchers took two groups of lean and obese mice, isolated the intestinal bacteria and saw that the population of the intestinal microbes in obese mice differed from those of the lean ones. If you put the bacteria of the oils in the slim, they make you fat. The obesity epidemic has been registered in the USA in recent years. Genetic studies that tried to find the genetic connection of the phenomenon and were unsuccessful. All our genes explain 5% of the phenomenon. There is one bacteria that is responsible for 6%. The question is, should we change our thinking and think that obesity is related to a bacterial epidemic?"