Keren Lavia is the winner of the PaymLab 2011 competition

Lavia is a doctoral student in a direct track for brain research at Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities. This is the fifth year in a row that the competition has been held and in all the competitions so far female scientists have won. Lavi will travel to the Science Festival in Chelantham, UK

Keren Lavia is the winner of the FaymLab 2011 competition that was held last night at Hamada in Tel Aviv. Lavia, 27 years old, is a doctoral student in a direct track for brain research at Bar Ilan in collaboration with the University of Haifa. Second place went to Rafi Arzi, a student for an advanced degree in mathematics and computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And in third place, Michael Talias, PhD student at the Ichilov Hospital and the Hebrew University.
The finals were attended by nine young scientists from all over the country who had advanced from preliminary stages held at the Technion, Hamada and the Science Museum in Jerusalem. The judges in the final competition were Lior Noy, who is both a scientist at the Weizmann Institute and a facilitator and teacher at the Playback Theater Ayelet Baram-Zabari, a faculty member at the Technion in the field of scientific communication, Doron Marko - an entrepreneur and inventor, and the actor and science enthusiast Sharon Alexander.
The competition was held in cooperation with the British Council and the winner will travel in about two weeks to the science festival in Chelantham in the UK, and will represent Israel in the international FeyLab competition. Eitan Crane, the host of the evening said that the competition was made possible thanks to the contribution of Prof. Michael Sela, former president of the Weizmann Institute and his wife Sarah, thanks to his personal contribution the competition is being held this year. The director of Hamada Tahila Ben Gaya said: "In recent years, 25 people have participated in a science culture project that we organize at Hamada, and I see this evening as the pinnacle of all the activities of science culture."
Simon Kay, head of the British Council in Israel: "Scientific training gives everyone the ability to explain complexity. Different perceptions in a way that doesn't patronize people. I think all the participants did a good job."

In her lecture, Lavi referred to her field of scientific practice - memory. "When I was little and studying for exams, my father told me that you could hear the gears in my brain working, I wanted to add oil that would make it easier for the system to operate and increase memory. My academic grandfather (the supervisor of my supervisor), Prof. Yadin Dodai from the Weizmann Institute conducted experiments on rats that liked to drink fresh water, then made them nauseous from the fresh water and checked whether they remembered this and avoided this water. Then he blocked the activity of a protein that caused the rats to forget everything they knew about the taste and they did not remember the previous experiences and approached the water. The next time they caused an increased production of the protein, rats that had high levels of the protein remembered better what the rats in the control group managed to forget."
"The conclusion - memory is not a one-time process but something dynamic that the brain needs to maintain and manipulate and this protein is the engine's oil. If we activate it the memory is better. Maybe it is possible to create a miracle pill that if we take it we will have a memory so that we don't forget anything, but do we really want that?"

In a conversation with the science website, Lavi explains: "I research learning and memory processes in rats. I came to the competition through Hamda, I come here to hear lectures. I think that bringing science to the general public is very important. I have been a science lover since a young age, even when I was in the gifted project in Holon, I participated in lectures at Tel Aviv University as part of science-seeking youth.

"I started my studies during my military service in the computer unit of Maram, at the Open University. And upon release, I continued to study while working in high-tech. When I finished my bachelor's degree, I realized that I wanted to continue working in science, so I devoted all my time to that. money is not everything."

Rafi Arzi spoke in his lecture about distributed algorithms and mathematical bits of artificial intelligence. And asked what can be learned from ants walking in a straight line.
An ant walks alone in a room on a rather long and winding path. Finds a hotel, returns to the nest and calls everyone. It turns out that even though it is returning on the same winding route, the convoy of ants following it is going in a straight line, the shortest line to the destination.
It turns out according to him that the rule is simple, the ants are limited in their mental capacity and therefore their rule is simple. Each ant must follow the ant in front of it in a straight line. It turns out that each ant shortens the original route a little until you reach the shortest possible route - a straight line.
This has implications for the field of robotics, when ant robotics were developed - each robot has limited knowledge of the local environment. It turns out that such robots can be sent to field cells and they will transmit details about it, when if you feed them in this port algorithm, with very few robots you can cover a large field cell.

Michael Talias PhD student at the Ichilov Hospital and the Hebrew University deals with a field that combines neuroscience and fetal development. Babies on order.
In his lecture, he explains: "Where I work, we do a fantastic medical process. Couples come who want to be parents who carry a hereditary disease and do not want a child born to them with a serious disease. We take eggs and sperm, produce embryos, when each embryo develops into 8 cells we take a single cell, run a genetic test on it and the healthy ones are returned to the womb. The point is that apart from genetic diseases it is possible to check if he is male or female. And in a few years we will be able to check whether the fetus will be blonde with blue eyes or short and fat. We can engineer babies before they are made and this provokes harsh reactions people say we are playing God.
"There are many philosophical and ethical problems, but there is another side to the coin. If in a few years we can know the genes that control human intelligence, we can engineer babies who will be smarter than us. In 3 generations to double the IQ. It can be a disaster or a simply amazing thing. It could also be the next step in the evolution of humans. After all, from the beginning we are interfering in the evolutionary processes. Once with a stick and a stone today in the laboratory. This is a fascinating subject and contains many dangers and many hopes."

Also participated:
Idan Yelin, PhD student in the Faculty of Biology at the Technion who spoke about epigenetics when parents pass messages to their children about nutrition in addition to genes.
Racheli Yuval, who graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University and did research work in nonlinear physics, which spoke about the relationship between a garbage bag and curled lettuce, and it turns out that the curls in both cases are fractals, that is, they are similar on any scale on which they are viewed.
Guy Ulmer is a software engineer at Cadence and has a degree in computer science at the Hebrew University who talked about multiplayer computer games such as World of Warcraft, and their relationship to predicting epidemics. This follows an epidemic that broke out and killed characters in the game, and what can be learned from this about the spread of epidemics in the real world. Except for one thing - the game developers revived dead characters, something that is a bit difficult to implement in reality.
Michal Samoni-Blank who spoke about Snow White and the poisoned apple, it turns out that not only in fairy tales, apple seeds like the seeds of many edible plants contain toxins and in particular cyanide and therefore it is not recommended to crack a cherry seed, for example. Snow White's mother just crushed an apple for her including the seeds inside.
Dafna Shizaf, who graduated with a master's degree in computer science and specialized in the field of computer translation, talked about the difficulties in the field - especially entering so many rules and linguistic rules into the computer so that it would know how to choose the right translation. It turns out that instead of making an effort, it's better to just give the computer texts in both languages ​​- for example Harry Potter books, and more. In her opinion, Shakespeare should only be translated once, and it is better for a person to do it.
Yael Barel - graduated with a bachelor's degree in biology and philosophy at the Hebrew University and has a certificate in developmental biology at the Hebrew University spoke about the toolbox of the animal world. It turns out that genes used in one animal for one thing are used in another animal for a completely different organ, which shows that the biological toolbox is limited, but diverse things can be built from it.