Science brief
Attosecond Laser Physics and Ancient Levant Migration
Israeli researchers unlock light-steered quantum currents in graphene, establish an academic haven in Berlin, and push back early human migration to 1.9 million years ago.
Science
Weizmann's trilateral research hub in Berlin establishes a permanent institutional anchor — shielding Israeli scientific talent from mounting international boycott pressures.
BackgroundThe Weizmann Institute is Israel's flagship basic research center, relying heavily on European Union grants and collaborative lab exchanges to fund fundamental discoveries. Mounting boycott pressures and visa frictions across Western universities have threatened international mobility and joint grant applications for Israeli faculty.
- Weizmann President Alon Chen and IAS Director David Nirenberg finalized the agreement at Berlin's historic Otto Warburg House with dedicated institutional funding.
- The consortium establishes rotating cross-border fellowships allowing postdoctoral researchers to conduct simultaneous appointments across Germany, Israel, and the United States without administrative barriers.
- German science ministries backed the partnership as an explicit institutional shield to preserve international academic freedom and collaborative scientific exchange amid geopolitical tensions.
Science
Re-dating Israel's 'Ubeidiya site to 1.9 million years rewrites human history — establishing the Jordan Valley as one of humanity's earliest migration corridors out of Africa.
Background'Ubeidiya is a premier Acheulean archaeological site near the Sea of Galilee containing early stone handaxes and fossilized mammalian remains. Complex tectonic shifting along the Dead Sea Transform fault had previously made absolute sediment dating exceptionally difficult for geological field teams.
- Researchers paired cosmogenic burial isotope testing with high-resolution magnetostratigraphy on prehistoric mollusk shells to establish the precise geological age of the sediment layers.
- The revised timeline places 'Ubeidiya alongside Georgia's Dmanisi as the oldest confirmed hominin occupation site discovered outside the African continent.
- The findings published in Quaternary Science Reviews prove ancient toolmakers maintained thriving multi-generational communities along the Jordan Rift Valley during the Early Pleistocene.
Science
Technion physicists steered electrons in graphene with ultrashort laser pulses — proving light alone can switch topological electronic states at attosecond speeds.
BackgroundFloquet topological states occur when oscillating light fields temporarily reshape a material's electronic structure to conduct currents without resistance. Graphene serves as an ideal testbed because its carbon lattice enables electrons to move at near-relativistic speeds under optical stimulation.
- Researchers fired circularly polarized femtosecond laser bursts at graphene flakes, driving directional electric currents that reversed instantly when the light polarization flipped.
- The study published in Nature Physics demonstrated that phase-locked optical pulses can switch electronic conduction states on attosecond timescales without generating destructive heat.
- The experimental platform provides a working blueprint for petahertz-scale logic gates, potentially accelerating future computing processors thousands of times beyond existing microchips.
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