Podcasts about weizmann institute

In this episode of Longevity by Design, host Dr. Gil Blander welcomes Dr. Eran Segal, Professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and personalized health. The conversation dives into how AI and machine learning are transforming our understanding of nutrition, disease prediction, and overall longevity. Eran provides a clear overview of AI, machine learning, and deep learning, explaining how these technologies can be applied to various health domains.Eran discusses the potential of AI agents in healthcare, such as scheduling appointments, managing medications, and even creating personalized dietary recommendations. He highlights the importance of data in training AI models, noting that the healthcare industry lags behind in publicly available and diverse data sets. The 10K Initiative, a project Eran leads, aims to address this issue by collecting comprehensive data on individuals to build more holistic AI models for personalized health.Gil and Eran consider the future, envisioning AI-powered digital twins that can simulate the impact of lifestyle changes on disease development. While AI offers exciting possibilities, Eran cautions against over-reliance, emphasizing the need for continued human oversight and validation. He reiterates that the foundation of longevity still relies on simple habits: sleep well, eat well, and exercise regularly.Guest-at-a-Glance

Mica shares the methods behind Augury's fault testing processes, why they use the highest quality data available, how in-house experts help them filter their data reliably, and their approach to communicating with customers. Our conversation also explores the balance between edge computing and cloud computing, and why both are necessary for optimal performance and monitoring.Key Points From This Episode:Mica's journey from studying physics at the Weizmann Institute to her current role at Augury.How her background in physics and neuroscience inform her work in AI.Why physicists are drawn to AI and data science; how scientists follow their curiosity.Mica's responsibilities in her role as algorithms team lead at Augury.How they develop algorithms and test for faults; why this requires the highest quality data.Understanding the role of their in-house expert vibration analysts.The importance of domain expertise in labeling and annotating data.Finding the balance between manual and automated processes in data labeling.How to communicate with customers and present metrics that matter to them.Augury's use of edge and cloud computing for optimal performance and monitoring.Quotes:“We look for better ways to adjust our algorithms and also develop new ones for all kinds of faults that could happen in the machines catching events that are trickier to catch, and for that we need highest quality data.” — Mica Rubinson [0:08:20]“At Aubrey, we have internal vibration analysts that are experts in their field. They go through very rigorous training process. There are international standards to how you do vibration analysis, and we have them in-house.” — Mica Rubinson [0:09:07]“[It's] really helpful for us to have [these] in-house experts. We have massive amounts of records – signal recordings from 10 years of machine monitoring. Thanks to these experts [in] labeling, we can filter out a lot of noisy parts of this data.” — Mica Rubinson [0:10:32]“We quantify [our services] for the customer as their ROI [and] how much they saved by using Augury. You had this [issue, and] we avoided this downtime. [We show] how much does it translates eventually [into] money that you saved.” — Mica Rubinson [0:22:28]Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:Mica Rubinson on LinkedInMica Rubinson on ResearchGateAuguryWeizmann Institute of ScienceHow AI HappensSama

Who solves puzzles better: Ants or humans? Guest: Dr. Ofer Feinerman, Professor in the Department of Physics of Complex Systems at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What really drove Trump to impose tariffs on Canada? Guest: Ian Austen, Ottawa-Based Reporter on Canada for The New York Times Times Should Canada sanction Trump's inner circle? Guest: Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, Senior Researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Who solves puzzles better: Ants or humans? Guest: Dr. Ofer Feinerman, Professor in the Department of Physics of Complex Systems at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel How are Trump's tariffs impacting BC businesses? Guest: Bridgitte Anderson, President and CEO of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade Turns out drugs are bad Guest: Tyler Kaster, Medical Head, Temerty Centre for Therapeutic Brain Intervention, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin's Laura Leay interviews David Cahen from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, about the impact surface defects have on bulk properties, specifically in the case of lead halide perovskites. In a perspective he co-authored, Cahen connected numerous experimental data from other researchers that exposed this phenomenon. By understanding how surface defects control the material's electronic behavior, researchers can pursue new materials for the development of long-lasting devices. This work was published in a recent issue of Advanced Materials. 

Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world. Political correspondent Tal Schneider and reporter Diana Bletter join host Jessica Steinberg for today's episode. Tensions are high in Israel over the possibility of a proposed hostage deal. Schneider discusses the Sunday phone conversation between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden regarding the negotiations. She also reviews which Israeli officials are currently in Doha, along with Steve Witkoff, President-elect Donald Trump's Middle East envoy. Schneider says Netanyahu met with coalition leaders Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, as the prime minister needs those two powerful coalition partners on board to approve any hostage deal. Bletter talks about her visits to two northern kibbutz communities where residents have been evacuated for more than a year and now have to decide what the future holds for them. She also discusses a Weizmann Institute study about ants, and their ability to work well as a team, unlike their human counterparts. For news updates, please check out The Times of Israel’s ongoing live blog. Discussed articles include: Biden stresses ‘immediate need’ for hostage-truce deal in call with Netanyahu Netanyahu dispatches top negotiators to Qatar talks amid push to seal hostage deal PM to meet with Smotrich to gauge support for a potential hostage deal — report Inside the Lebanon-border closed military zone, kibbutz members prepare to start over Ants have more ‘group smarts’ than humans, Israeli study finds Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Podwaves. IMAGE: People walking next to a poster of Israelis held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, 'We won't stop until they're all released!' in Jerusalem, January 12, 2025 ( Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Artificial sweeteners are everywhere. They hide in cereal, salad dressing – even in health foods. But are they really a guilt-free way to satisfy your sweet tooth? Or is it naive to think that – because they're zero calorie – they're free of consequence? New research shows there is a consequence. And it could be massive. Artificial sweeteners may disrupt the delicate balance of bacteria that live in your gut. You could see ripple effects like chronic disease, weight gain and a weakened ability to process real sugar. Today's guest is at the forefront of this research. For the last decade, Dr Eran Elinav led breakthroughs on the science behind popular sweeteners. He leads The Institute for Microbiome Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He's published over 100 publications in leading scientific journals. And his lab is on the cutting-edge of gut microbiome research.  We're also joined today by Tim Spector. Tim is one of the world's top 100 most-cited scientists, a professor of epidemiology, and my scientific Co-Founder at ZOE.  You'll finish today's episode knowing what's in your sweetener, how it's affecting you, and where to turn to satisfy your sweet tooth.   

Yochai's book, Not in Our Brain: Consciousness, Body, World (Magnes Press, 2019), examines the meaning of psychology and life based on the premise (following Merleau-Ponty's theory) that we are present in the world through our bodies. We are not merely rational beings or machines, but our existence in the world is through the body. While the book examines Merleau-Ponty's theory through stories of prisoners and people dedicated to meditation, our conversation took a different and fascinating direction. We examined the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza through the lens of Merleau-Ponty and the question of trauma. Yochai Ataria is a professor at Tel-Hai College, Israel. He completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and conducted post-doctoral research in the Neurobiology Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His notable works include The Structural Trauma of Western Culture (2017), Body Disownership in Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (2018), The Mathematics of Trauma [in Hebrew] (2014), Not in Our Brain [in Hebrew] (2019), Levi versus Ka-Tsetnik (2022), Consciousness in Flesh (2022), and Genes, Technology, and Apocalypse (2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Yochai's book, Not in Our Brain: Consciousness, Body, World (Magnes Press, 2019), examines the meaning of psychology and life based on the premise (following Merleau-Ponty's theory) that we are present in the world through our bodies. We are not merely rational beings or machines, but our existence in the world is through the body. While the book examines Merleau-Ponty's theory through stories of prisoners and people dedicated to meditation, our conversation took a different and fascinating direction. We examined the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza through the lens of Merleau-Ponty and the question of trauma. Yochai Ataria is a professor at Tel-Hai College, Israel. He completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and conducted post-doctoral research in the Neurobiology Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His notable works include The Structural Trauma of Western Culture (2017), Body Disownership in Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (2018), The Mathematics of Trauma [in Hebrew] (2014), Not in Our Brain [in Hebrew] (2019), Levi versus Ka-Tsetnik (2022), Consciousness in Flesh (2022), and Genes, Technology, and Apocalypse (2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Yochai's book, Not in Our Brain: Consciousness, Body, World (Magnes Press, 2019), examines the meaning of psychology and life based on the premise (following Merleau-Ponty's theory) that we are present in the world through our bodies. We are not merely rational beings or machines, but our existence in the world is through the body. While the book examines Merleau-Ponty's theory through stories of prisoners and people dedicated to meditation, our conversation took a different and fascinating direction. We examined the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza through the lens of Merleau-Ponty and the question of trauma. Yochai Ataria is a professor at Tel-Hai College, Israel. He completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and conducted post-doctoral research in the Neurobiology Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His notable works include The Structural Trauma of Western Culture (2017), Body Disownership in Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (2018), The Mathematics of Trauma [in Hebrew] (2014), Not in Our Brain [in Hebrew] (2019), Levi versus Ka-Tsetnik (2022), Consciousness in Flesh (2022), and Genes, Technology, and Apocalypse (2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Yochai's book, Not in Our Brain: Consciousness, Body, World (Magnes Press, 2019), examines the meaning of psychology and life based on the premise (following Merleau-Ponty's theory) that we are present in the world through our bodies. We are not merely rational beings or machines, but our existence in the world is through the body. While the book examines Merleau-Ponty's theory through stories of prisoners and people dedicated to meditation, our conversation took a different and fascinating direction. We examined the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza through the lens of Merleau-Ponty and the question of trauma. Yochai Ataria is a professor at Tel-Hai College, Israel. He completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and conducted post-doctoral research in the Neurobiology Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His notable works include The Structural Trauma of Western Culture (2017), Body Disownership in Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (2018), The Mathematics of Trauma [in Hebrew] (2014), Not in Our Brain [in Hebrew] (2019), Levi versus Ka-Tsetnik (2022), Consciousness in Flesh (2022), and Genes, Technology, and Apocalypse (2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

A leader for conducting rigorous randomized trials of humans along with animal models for understanding nutrition and metabolism, Dr. Kevin Hall is a Senior Investigator at the National Institutes of Health, and Section Chief of the Integrative Physiology Section, NIDDK. In this podcast, we reviewed his prolific body of research a recent publications. The timing of optimizing our diet and nutrition seems apropos, now that we're in in the midst of the holiday season!Below is a video snippet of our conversation on his ultra-processed food randomized trial.Full videos of all Ground Truths podcasts can be seen on YouTube here. The current one is here. If you like the YouTube format, please subscribe! The audios are also available on Apple and Spotify.Note: I'll be doing a Ground Truths Live Chat on December 11th at 12 N EST, 9 AM PST, so please mark your calendar and join!Transcript with links to publications and audioEric Topol (00:05):Well, hello. This is Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I'm really delighted to have with me today, Dr. Kevin Hall from the NIH. I think everybody knows that nutrition is so important and Kevin is a leader in doing rigorous randomized trials, which is not like what we usually see with large epidemiologic studies of nutrition that rely on food diaries and the memory of participants. So Kevin, it's really terrific to have you here.Kevin Hall (00:34):Thanks so much for the invitation.Ultra-Processed FoodsEric Topol (00:36):Yeah. Well, you've been prolific and certainly one of the leaders in nutrition science who I look to. And what I thought we could do is go through some of your seminal papers. There are many, but I picked a few and I thought we'd first go back to the one that you published in Cell Metabolism. This is ultra-processed diets cause excessive caloric intake and weight gain. (Main results in graph below.) So maybe you can take us through the principle findings from that trial.Kevin Hall (01:10):Yeah, sure. So that was a really interesting study because it's the first randomized control trial that's investigated the role of ultra-processed foods in potentially causing obesity. So we've got, as you mentioned, lots and lots of epidemiological data that have made these associations between people who consume diets that are very high in ultra-processed foods as having greater risk for obesity. But those trials are not demonstrating causation. I mean, they suggest a strong link. And in fact, the idea of ultra-processed foods is kind of a new idea. It's really sort of appeared on the nutrition science stage probably most prominently in the past 10 years or so. And I first learned about this idea of ultra-processed foods, which is really kind of antithetical to the way most nutrition scientists think about foods. We often think about foods as nutrient delivery vehicles, and we kind of view foods as being the fraction of carbohydrates versus fats in them or how much sodium or fiber is in the foods.Kevin Hall (02:17):And along came this group in Brazil who introduced this new way of classifying foods that completely ignores the nutrient composition and says what we should be doing is classifying foods based on the extent and purpose of processing of foods. And so, they categorize these four different categories. And in the fourth category of this so-called NOVA classification scheme (see graphic below) , they identified something called ultra-processed foods. There's a long formal definition and it's evolved a little bit over the years and continues to evolve. But the basic ideas that these are foods that are manufactured by industries that contain a lot of purified ingredients made from relatively cheap agricultural commodity products that basically undergo a variety of processes and include additives and ingredients that are not typically found in home kitchens, but are typically exclusively in manufactured products to create the wide variety of mostly packaged goods that we see in our supermarkets.Kevin Hall (03:22):And so, I was really skeptical that there was much more about the effects of these foods. Other than that they typically have high amounts of sugar and saturated fat and salt, and they're pretty low in fiber. And so, the purpose of this study was to say, okay, well if there's something more about the foods themselves that is causing people to overconsume calories and gain weight and eventually get obesity, then we should do a study that's trying to test for two diets that are matched for these various nutrients of concern. So they should be matched for the macronutrients, they should be matched for the sugar content, the fat, the sodium, the fiber, and people should just be allowed to eat whatever they want and they shouldn't be trying to change their weight in any way. And so, the way that we did this was, as you mentioned, we can't just ask people to report what they're eating.Kevin Hall (04:19):So what we did was we admitted these folks to the NIH Clinical Center and to our metabolic ward, and it's a very artificial environment, but it's an environment that we can control very carefully. And so, what we basically did is take control over their food environment and we gave them three meals a day and snacks, and basically for a two-week period, they had access to meals that were more than 80% of calories coming from ultra-processed foods. And then in random order, they either received that diet first and give them simple instructions, eat as much as little as you want. We're going to measure lots of stuff. You shouldn't be trying to change your weight or weight that gave them a diet that had no calories from ultra-processed foods. In fact, 80% from minimally processed foods. But again, both of these two sort of food environments were matched for these nutrients that we typically think of as playing a major role in how many calories people choose to eat.Kevin Hall (05:13):And so, the basic idea was, okay, well let's measure what these folks eat. We gave them more than double the calories that they would require to maintain their weight, and what they didn't know was that in the basement of the clinical center where the metabolic kitchen is, we had all of our really talented nutrition staff measuring the leftovers to see what it was that they didn't eat. So we knew exactly what we provided to them and all the foods had to be in our nutrition database and when we compute what they actually ate by difference, so we have a very precise estimate about not only what foods they chose to ate, but also how many calories they chose to eat, as well as the nutrient composition.And the main upshot of all that was that when these folks were exposed to this highly ultra-processed food environment, they spontaneously chose to eat about 500 calories per day more over the two-week period they were in that environment then when the same folks were in the environment that had no ultra-processed foods, but just minimally processed foods. They not surprisingly gained weight during the ultra-processed food environment and lost weight and lost body fat during the minimally processed food environment. And because those diets were overall matched for these different nutrients, it didn't seem to be that those were the things that were driving this big effect. So I think there's a couple of big take homes here. One is that the food environment really does have a profound effect on just the biology of how our food intake is controlled at least over relatively short periods of time, like the two-week periods that we were looking at. And secondly, that there's something about ultra-processed foods that seem to be driving this excess calorie intake that we now know has been linked with increased risk of obesity, and now we're starting to put some of the causal pieces together that really there might be something in this ultra-processed food environment that's driving the increased rates of obesity that we've seen over the past many decades.Eric Topol (07:18):Yeah, I mean I think the epidemiologic studies that make the link between ultra-processed foods and higher risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, neurodegenerative disease. They're pretty darn strong and they're backed up by this very rigorous study. Now you mentioned it short term, do you have any reason to think that adding 500 calories a day by eating these bad foods, which by the way in the American diet is about 60% or more of the average American diet, do you have any inkling that it would change after a few weeks?Kevin Hall (07:54):Well, I don't know about after a few weeks, but I think that one of the things that we do know about body weight regulation and how it changes in body weight impact both metabolism, how many calories were burning as well as our appetite. We would expect some degree of moderation of that effect eventually settling in at a new steady state, that's probably going to take months and years to achieve. And so the question is, I certainly don't believe that it would be a 500 calorie a day difference indefinitely. The question is when would that difference converge and how much weight would've been gained or lost when people eventually reached that new plateau? And so, that's I think a really interesting question. Some folks have suggested that maybe if you extrapolated the lines a little bit, you could predict when those two curves might eventually converge. That's an interesting thought experiment, but I think we do need some longer studies to investigate how persistent are these effects. Can that fully explain the rise in average body weight and obesity rates that have occurred over the past several decades? Those are open questions.Eric Topol (09:03):Yeah. Well, I mean, I had the chance to interview Chris van Tulleken who wrote the book, Ultra-Processed People and I think you might remember in the book he talked about how he went on an ultra-processed diet and gained some 20, 30 pounds in a short time in a month. And his brother, his identical twin brother gained 50, 60 pounds, and so it doesn't look good. Do you look at all the labels and avoid all this junk and ultra-processed food now or are you still thinking that maybe it's not as bad as it looks?Kevin Hall (09:38):Well, I mean I think that I certainly learned a lot from our studies, and we are continuing to follow this up to try to figure out what are the mechanisms by which this happen. But at the same time, I don't think we can throw out everything else we know about nutrition science. So just because we match these various nutrients in this particular study, I think one of the dangers here is that as you mentioned, there's 60% of the food environment in the US and Great Britain and other places consist of these foods, and so they're unavoidable to some extent, right? Unless you're one of these privileged folks who have your backyard garden and your personal chef who can make all of your foods, I'm certainly not one of those people, but for the vast majority of us, we're going to have to incorporate some degree of ultra-processed foods in our day-to-day diet.Kevin Hall (10:24):The way I sort of view it is, we really need to understand the mechanisms and before we understand the mechanisms, we have to make good choices based on what we already know about nutrition science, that we should avoid the foods that have a lot of sugar in them. We should avoid foods that have a lot of saturated fat and sodium. We should try to choose products that contain lots of whole grains and legumes and fruits and vegetables and things like that. And there's some of those, even in the ultra-processed food category. I pretty regularly consume a microwavable ready meal for lunch. It tends to be pretty high in whole grains and legumes and low in saturated fat and sugar and things like that. But to engineer a food that can heat up properly in a microwave in four minutes has some ultra-processing technology involved there. I would be pretty skeptical that that's going to cause me to have really poor health consequences as compared to if I had the means to eat homemade French fries every day in tallow. But that's the kind of comparison that we have to think about.Eric Topol (11:36):But I think what you're touching on and maybe inadvertently is in that NOVA class four, the bad ultra-processed foods, there's a long, long list of course, and some of those may be worse than others, and we haven't seen an individual ranking of these constituents. So as you're alluding to what's in that microwave lunch probably could be much less concerning than what's in these packaged snacks that are eaten widely. But I would certainly agree that we don't know everything about this, but your study is one of the most quoted studies ever in the ultra-processed food world. Now, let me move on to another trial that was really important. This was published in Nature Medicine and it's about a plant-based diet, which is of course a very interesting diet, low-fat versus an animal-based ketogenic diet. Also looking at energy intake. Can you take us through that trial?Plant-Based, Low Fat Diet vs Animal-Based, Low Carbohydrate Ketogenic DietKevin Hall (12:33):Sure. So it's actually interesting to consider that trial in the context of the trial we just talked about because both of these diets that we tested in this trial were relatively low in ultra-processed foods, and so both of them contained more than a kilogram of non-starchy vegetables as a base for designing these, again, two different food environments. Very similar overall study design where people again were exposed to either diets that were vegan plant-based diet that was really high in starches and was designed to kind of cause big insulin increases in the blood after eating the meals. And the other diet had very, very few carbohydrates of less than 10% in total, and we built on that kind of non-starchy vegetable base, a lot of animal-based products to kind of get a pretty high amount of fat and having very low carbohydrates. Both diets in this case, like I mentioned, were pretty low in ultra-processed foods, but what we were really interested in here was testing this idea that has come to prominence recently, that high carbohydrate diets that lead to really large glucose excursions after meals that cause very high insulin levels after meals are particularly obesogenic and should cause you to be hungrier than compared to a diet that doesn't lead to those large swings in glucose and insulin and the prototypical case being one that's very low in carbohydrate and might increase the level of ketones that are floating around in your blood, which are hypothesized to be an appetite suppressant. Same sort of design, these minimally processed diets that one was very high in carbs and causes large swings in insulin and the other that's very low in carbs and causes increases in ketones.Kevin Hall (14:22):We ask people, again, while you're in one food environment or the other, don't be trying to gain weight or lose weight, eat as much or as little as you'd like, and we're going to basically measure a lot of things. They again, don't know what the primary outcome of the study is. We're measuring their leftovers afterwards. And so, the surprise in this particular case was that the diet that caused the big swings in glucose and insulin did not lead to more calorie consumption. In fact, it led to about 700 calories per day less than when the same people were exposed to the ketogenic diet. Interestingly, both food environments caused people to lose weight, so it wasn't that we didn't see the effect of people over consuming calories on either diet, so they were reading fewer calories in general than they were when they came in, right. They're probably eating a pretty ultra-processed food diet when they came in. We put them on these two diets that varied very much in terms of the macronutrients that they were eating, but both were pretty minimally processed. They lost weight. They ended up losing more body fat on the very low-fat high carb diet than the ketogenic diet, but actually more weight on the ketogenic diet than the low-fat diet. So there's a little bit of a dissociation between body fat loss and weight loss in this study, which was kind of interesting.Eric Topol (15:49):Interesting. Yeah, I thought that was a fascinating trial because plant-based diet, they both have their kind of camps, you know.Kevin Hall (15:57):Right. No, exactly.Immune System Signatures for Vegan vs Ketogenic DietsEric Topol (15:58):There are people who aren't giving up on ketogenic diet. Of course, there's some risks and some benefits and there's a lot of interest of course with the plant-based diet. So it was really interesting and potentially the additive effects of plant-based with avoidance or lowering of ultra-processed food. Now, the more recent trial that you did also was very interesting, and of course I'm only selecting ones that I think are particularly, there are a lot of trials you've done, but this one is more recent in this year where you looked at vegan versus ketogenic diets for the immune signature, immune response, which is really important. It's underplayed as its effect, and so maybe you can take us through that one.[Link to a recent Nature feature on this topic, citing Dr. Hall's work]Kevin Hall (16:43):Yeah, so just to be clear, it's actually the same study, the one that we just talked about. This is a secondary sort of analysis from a collaboration we had with some folks at NIAID here at the NIH to try to evaluate immune systems signatures in these same folks who wonder what these two changes in their food environment. One is vegan, high carbohydrate low-fat diet and the other, the animal-based ketogenic diet. And again, it was pretty interesting to me that we were able to see really substantial changes in how the immune system was responding. First of all, both diets again seem to have improved immune function, both adaptive and innate immune function as compared to their baseline measurements when they came into the study. So when they're reading their habitual diet, whatever that is typically high in ultra-processed foods, they switched to both of these diets.Kevin Hall (17:39):We saw market changes in their immune system even compared to baseline. But when we then went and compared the two diets, they were actually divergent also, in other words, the vegan diet seemed to stimulate the innate immune system and the ketogenic diet seemed to stimulate the adaptive immune system. So these are the innate immune system can be thought of. Again, I'm not an immunologist. My understanding is that this is the first line defense against pathogens. It happens very quickly and then obviously the adaptive immune system then adapts to a specific pathogen over time. And so, this ability of our diet to change the immune system is intriguing and how much of that has to do with influencing the gut microbiota, which obviously the gut plays a huge role in steering our immune system in one direction versus another. I think those are some really intriguing mechanistic questions that are really good fodder for future research.Eric Topol (18:42):Yeah, I think it may have implications for treatment of autoimmune diseases. You may want to comment about that.Kevin Hall (18:51):Yeah, it's fascinating to think about that the idea that you could change your diet and manipulate your microbiota and manipulate your gut function in a way to influence your immune system to steer you away from a response that may actually be causing your body damage in your typical diet. It's a fascinating area of science and we're really interested to follow that up. I mean, it kind of supports these more anecdotal reports of people with lupus, for example, who've reported that when they try to clean up their diet for a period of time and eliminate certain foods and eliminate perhaps even ultra-processed food products, that they feel so much better that their symptoms alleviate at least for some period of time. Obviously, it doesn't take the place of the therapeutics that they need to take, but yeah, we're really interested in following this up to see what this interaction might be.Eric Topol (19:46):Yeah, it's fascinating. It also gets to the fact that certain people have interesting responses. For example, those with epilepsy can respond very well to a ketogenic diet. There's also been diet proposed for cancer. In fact, I think there's some even ongoing trials for cancer of specific diets. Any comments about that?Kevin Hall (20:10):Yeah, again, it's a really fascinating area. I mean, I think we kind of underappreciate and view diet in this lens of weight loss, which is not surprising because that's kind of where it's been popularized. But I think the role of nutrition and how you can manipulate your diet and still you can have a very healthy version of a ketogenic diet. You can have a very healthy version of a low-fat, high carb diet and how they can be used in individual cases to kind of manipulate factors that might be of concern. So for example, if you're concerned about blood glucose levels, clearly a ketogenic diet is moderating those glucose levels over time, reducing insulin levels, and that might have some positive downstream consequences and there's some potential downsides. Your apoB levels might go up. So, you have to kind of tune these things to the problems and the situations that individuals may face. And similarly, if you have issues with blood glucose control, maybe a high carbohydrate diet might not be for you, but if that's not an issue and you want to reduce apoB levels, it seems like that is a relatively effective way to do that, although it does tend to increase fasting triglyceride levels.Kevin Hall (21:27):So again, there's all of these things to consider, and then when you open the door beyond traditional metabolic health markers to things like inflammation and autoimmune disease as well as some of these other things like moderating how cancer therapeutics might work inside the body. I think it's a really fascinating and interesting area to pursue.Eric Topol (21:55):No question about it. And that also brings in the dimension of the gut microbiome, which obviously your diet has a big influence, and it has an influence on your brain, brain-gut axis, and the immune system. It's all very intricate, a lot of feedback loops and interactions that are not so easy to dissect, right?Kevin Hall (22:16):Absolutely. Yeah, especially in humans. That's why we rely on our basic science colleagues to kind of figure out these individual steps in these chains. And of course, we do need human experiments and carefully controlled experiments to see how much of that really translates to humans, so we need this close sort of translational partnership.On the Pathogenesis of Obesity, Calories In and Calories OutEric Topol (22:35):Yeah. Now, you've also written with colleagues, other experts in the field about understanding the mechanisms of pathogenesis of obesity and papers that we'll link to. We're going to link to everything for what we've been discussing about calories in, calories out, and that's been the longstanding adage about this. Can you enlighten us, what is really driving obesity and calories story?Kevin Hall (23:05):Well, I co-organized a meeting for the Royal Society, I guess about a year and a half ago, and we got together all these experts from around the world, and the basic message is that we have lots of competing theories about what is driving obesity. There's a few things that we all agree on. One is that there is a genetic component. That adiposity in a given environment is somewhere between 40% to 70% heritable, so our genes play a huge role. It seems like there's certain genes that can play a major role. Like if you have a mutation in leptin, for example, or the leptin receptor, then this can have a monogenic cause of obesity, but that's very, very rare. What seems to be the case is that it's a highly polygenic disease with individual gene variants contributing a very, very small amount to increased adiposity. But our genes have not changed that much as obesity prevalence has increased over the past 50 years. And so, something in the environment has been driving that, and that's where the real debates sort of starts, right?Kevin Hall (24:14):I happen to be in the camp that thinks that the food environment is probably one of the major drivers and our food have changed substantially, and we're trying to better understand, for example, how ultra-processed foods which have risen kind of in parallel with the increased prevalence of obesity. What is it about ultra-processed foods that tend to drive us to overconsume calories? Other folks focus maybe more on what signals from the body have been altered by the foods that we're eating. They might say that the adipose tissue because of excess insulin secretion for example, is basically driven into a storage mode and that sends downstream signals that are eventually sensed by the brain to change our appetite and things like that. There's a lot of debate about that, but again, I think that these are complementary hypotheses that are important to sort out for sure and important to design experiments to try to figure out what is more likely. But there is a lot of agreement on the idea that there's something in our environment has changed.Kevin Hall (25:17):I think there's even maybe a little bit less agreement of exactly what that is. I think that there's probably a little bit more emphasis on the food environment as opposed to there are other folks who think increased pollution might be driving some of this, especially endocrine disrupting chemicals that have increased in prevalence. I think that's a viable hypothesis. I think we have to try to rank order what we think are the most likely and largest contributors. They could all be contributing to some extent and maybe more so in some people rather than others, but our goal is to try to, maybe that's a little simple minded, but let's take the what I think is the most important thing and let's figure out the mechanisms of that most important thing and we'll, number one, determine if it is the most important thing. In my case, I think something about ultra-processed foods that are driving much of what we're seeing. If we could better understand that, then we could both advise consumers to avoid certain kinds of foods because of certain mechanisms and still be able to consume some degree of ultra-processed foods. They are convenient and tasty and relatively inexpensive and don't require a lot of skill and equipment to prepare. But then if we focus on the true bad guys in that category because we really understand the mechanisms, then I think that would be a major step forward. But that's just my hypothesis.Eric Topol (26:43):Well, I'm with you actually. Everything I've read, everything I've reviewed on ultra-processed food is highly incriminating, and I also get frustrated that nothing is getting done about it, at least in this country. But on the other hand, it doesn't have to be either or, right? It could be both these, the glycemic index story also playing a role. Now, when you think about this and you're trying to sort out calories in and calories out, and let's say it's one of your classic experiments where you have isocaloric proteins and fat and carbohydrate exactly nailed in the different diets you're examining. Is it really about calories or is it really about what is comprising the calorie?Kevin Hall (27:29):Yeah, so I think this is the amazing thing, even in our ultra-processed food study, if we asked the question across those people, did the people who ate more calories even in the ultra-processed diet, did they gain more weight? The answer is yes.Kevin Hall (27:44):There's a very strong linear correlation between calorie intake and weight change. I tend to think that I started my career in this space focusing more on the metabolism side of the equation, how the body's using the calories and how much does energy expenditure change when you vary the proportion of carbs versus fat, for example. The effect size is there, they might be there, but they're really tiny of the order of a hundred calories per day. What really struck me is that when we just kind of changed people's food environments, the magnitude of the effects are like we mentioned, 500 to 700 calories per day differences. So I think that the real trick is to figure out how is it that the brain is regulating our body weight in some way that we are beginning to understand from a molecular perspective? What I think is less well understood is, how is that food intake control system altered by the food environment that we find ourselves in?The Brain and GLP-1 DrugsKevin Hall (28:42):There are a few studies now in mice that are beginning to look at how pathways in the brain that have been believed to be related to reward and not necessarily homeostatic control of food intake. They talk to the regions of the brain that are related to homeostatic control of food intake, and it's a reciprocal sort of feedback loop there, and we're beginning to understand that. And I think if we get more details about what it is in our foods that are modulating that system, then we'll have a better understanding of what's really driving obesity and is it different in different people? Are there subcategories of obesity where certain aspects of the food environment are more important than others, and that might be completely flipped in another person. I don't know the answer to that question yet, but it seems like there are certain common factors that might be driving overall changes in obesity prevalence and how they impact this reward versus homeostatic control systems in the brain, I think are really fascinating questions.Eric Topol (29:43):And I think we're getting much more insight about this circuit of the reward in the brain with the food intake, things like optogenetics, many ways that we're getting at this. And so, it's fascinating. Now, that gets me to the miracle drug class GLP-1, which obviously has a big interaction with obesity, but of course much more than that. And you've written about this as well regarding this topic of sarcopenic obesity whereby you lose a lot of weight, but do you lose muscle mass or as you referred to earlier, you lose body fat and maybe not so much muscle mass. Can you comment about your views about the GLP-1 family of drugs and also about this concern of muscle mass loss?Kevin Hall (30:34):Yeah, so I think it's a really fascinating question, and we've been trying to develop mathematical models about how our body composition changes with weight gain and weight loss for decades now. And this has been a long topic, one of the things that many people may not realize is that people with obesity don't just have elevated adiposity, they also have elevated muscle mass and lean tissue mass overall. So when folks with obesity lose weight, and this was initially a pretty big concern with bariatric surgery, which has been the grandfather of ways that people have lost a lot of weight. The question has been is there a real concern about people losing too much weight and thereby becoming what you call sarcopenic? They have too little muscle mass and then they have difficulties moving around. And of course, there are probably some people like that, but I think what people need to realize is that folks with obesity tend to start with much higher amounts of lean tissue mass as well as adiposity, and they start off with about 50% of your fat-free mass, and the non-fat component of your body is skeletal muscle.Kevin Hall (31:45):So you're already starting off with quite a lot. And so, the question then is when you lose a lot of weight with the GLP-1 receptor agonist or with bariatric surgery, how much of that weight loss is coming from fat-free mass and skeletal muscle versus fat mass? And so, we've been trying to simulate that using what we've known about bariatric surgery and what we've known about just intentional weight loss or weight gain over the years. And one of the things that we found was that our sort of expectations for what's expected for the loss of fat-free mass with these different drugs as well as bariatric surgery, for the most part, they match our expectations. In other words, the expected amount of fat loss and fat free mass loss. The one outlier interestingly, was the semaglutide study, and in that case, they lost more fat-free mass than would be expected.Kevin Hall (32:44):Now, again, that's just raising a little bit of a flag that for whatever reason, from a body composition perspective, it's about a hundred people underwent these repeated DEXA scans in that study sponsored by Novo Nordisk. So it's not a huge number of people, but it's enough to really get a good estimate about the proportion of weight loss. Whether or not that has functional consequences, I think is the open question. There's not a lot of reports of people losing weight with semaglutide saying, you know what? I'm really having trouble actually physically moving around. I feel like I've lost a lot of strength. In fact, it seems to be the opposite, right, that the quality of the muscle there seems to be improved. They seem to have more physical mobility because they've lost so much more weight, that weight had been inhibiting their physical movement in the past.Kevin Hall (33:38):So it's something to keep an eye on. It's an open question whether or not we need additional therapies in certain categories of patients, whether that be pharmacological, there are drugs that are interesting that tend to increase muscle mass. There's also other things that we know increase muscle mass, right? Resistance exercise training, increase this muscle mass. And so, if you're really concerned about this, I certainly, I'm not a physician, but I think it's something to consider that if you go on one of these drugs, you might want to think about increasing your resistance exercise training, maybe increasing the protein content of your diet, which then can support that muscle building. But I think it's a really interesting open question about what the consequences of this might be in certain patient populations, especially over longer periods of time.Dietary Protein, Resistance Exercise, DEXA ScansEric Topol (34:30):Yeah, you've just emphasized some really key points here. Firstly, that resistance exercise is good for you anyway. And get on one of these drugs, why don't you amp it up or get it going? The second is about the protein diet, which it'd be interesting to get your thoughts on that, but we generally have too low of a protein diet, but then there are some who are advocating very high protein diets like one gram per pound, not just one gram per kilogram. And there have been studies to suggest that that very high protein diet could be harmful, but amping up the protein diet, that would be a countering thing. But the other thing you mentioned is a DEXA scan, which can be obtained very inexpensively, and because there's a variability in this muscle mass loss if it's occurring, I wonder if that's a prudent thing or if you just empirically would just do the things that you mentioned. Do you have any thoughts about that?Kevin Hall (35:32):Yeah, that's really a clinical question that I don't deal with on a day-to-day basis. And yeah, I think there's probably better people suited to that. DEXA scans, they're relatively inexpensive, but they're not readily accessible to everyone. I certainly wouldn't want to scare people away from using drugs that are now known to be very effective for weight loss and pretty darn safe as far as we can tell, just because they don't have access to a DEXA scanner or something like that.Eric Topol (36:00):Sure. No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, the only reason I thought it might be useful is if you're concerned about this and you want to track, for example, how much is that resistant training doing?Kevin Hall (36:13):But I think for people who have the means to do that, sure. I can't see any harm in it for sure.Continuous Glucose Sensors?Eric Topol (36:19):Yeah. That gets me to another metric that you've written about, which is continuous glucose tracking. As you know, this is getting used, I think much more routinely in type one insulin diabetics and people with type 2 that are taking insulin or difficult to manage. And now in recent months there have been consumer approved that is no prescription needed, just go to the drugstore and pick up your continuous glucose sensor. And you've written about that as well. Can you summarize your thoughts on it?Kevin Hall (36:57):Yeah, sure. I mean, yeah, first of all, these tools have been amazing for people with diabetes and who obviously are diagnosed as having a relative inability to regulate their glucose levels. And so, these are critical tools for people in that population. I think the question is are they useful for people who don't have diabetes and is having this one metric and where you target all this energy into this one thing that you can now measure, is that really a viable way to kind of modulate your lifestyle and your diet? And how reliable are these CGM measurements anyway? In other words, do they give the same response to the same meal on repeated occasions? Does one monitor give the same response as another monitor? And those are the kinds of experiments that we've done. Again, secondary analysis, these trials that we talked about before, we have people wearing continuous glucose monitors all the time and we know exactly what they ate.Kevin Hall (37:59):And so, in a previous publication several years ago, we basically had two different monitors. One basically is on the arm, which is the manufacturer's recommendation, the other is on the abdomen, which is the manufacturer's recommendation. They're wearing them simultaneously. And we decided just to compare what were the responses to the same meals in simultaneous measurements. And they were correlated with each other thankfully, but they weren't as well predictive as you might expect. In other words, one device might give a very high glucose reading to consuming one meal and the other might barely budge, whereas the reverse might happen for a different meal. And so, we asked the question, if we were to rank the glucose spikes by one meal, so we have all these meals, let's rank them according to the glucose spikes of one device. Let's do the simultaneous measurements with the other device.Kevin Hall (38:53):Do we get a different set of rankings? And again, they're related to each other, but they're not overlapping. They're somewhat discordant. And so, then the question becomes, okay, well if I was basically using this one metric to kind of make my food decisions by one device, I actually start making different decisions compared to if I happen to have been wearing a different device. So what does this really mean? And I think this sort of foundational research on how much of a difference you would need to make a meaningful assessment about, yeah, this is actionable from a lifestyle perspective, even if that is the one metric that you're interested in. That sort of foundational research I don't think has really been done yet. More recently, we asked the question, okay, let's ignore the two different devices. Let's stick to the one where we put it on our arm, and let's ask the question.Kevin Hall (39:43):We've got repeated meals and we've got them in this very highly regimented and controlled environment, so we know exactly what people ate previously. We know the timing of the meals, we know when they did their exercise, we know how much they were moving around, how well they slept the night before. All of these factors we could kind of control. And the question that we asked in that study was, do people respond similarly to the same meal on repeated occasions? Is that better than when you actually give them very different meals? But they match overall for macronutrient content, for example. And the answer to that was surprisingly no. We had as much variability in the glucose response to the same person consuming the same meal on two occasions as a whole bunch of different meals. Which suggests again, that there's enough variability that it makes it difficult to then recommend on for just two repeats of a meal that this is going to be a meal that's going to cause your blood glucose to be moderate or blood glucose to be very high. You're going to have to potentially do this on many, many different occasions to kind of figure out what's the reliable response of these measurements. And again, that foundational research is typically not done. And I think if we're really going to use this metric as something that is going to change our lifestyles and make us choose some meals other than others, then I think we need that foundational research. And all we know now is that two repeats of the same meal is not going to do it.Eric Topol (41:21):Well, were you using the current biosensors of 2024 or were you using ones from years ago on that?Kevin Hall (41:27):No, we were using ones from several years ago when these studies were completed. But interestingly, the variability in the venous measurements to meal tests is also very, very different. So it's probably not the devices per se that are highly variable. It's that we don't really know on average how to predict these glucose responses unless there's huge differences in the glycemic load. So glycemic load is a very old concept that when you have very big differences in glycemic load, yeah, you can on average predict that one kind of meal is going to give rise to a much larger glucose excursion than another. But typically these kind of comparisons are now being made within a particular person. And we're comparing meals that might have quite similar glycemic loads with the claim that there's something specific about that person that causes them to have a much bigger glucose spike than another person. And that we can assess that with a couple different meals.Eric Topol (42:31):But also, we know that the spikes or the glucose regulation, it's very much affected by so many things like stress, like sleep, like exercise. And so, it wouldn't be at all surprising that if you had the exact same food, but all these other factors were modulated that it might not have the same response. But the other thing, just to get your comment on. Multiple groups, particularly starting in Israel, the Weizmann Institute, Eran Segal and his colleagues, and many subsequent have shown that if you give the exact same amount of that food, the exact same time to a person, they eat the exact same amount. Their glucose response is highly heterogeneous and variable between people. Do you think that that's true? That in fact that our metabolism varies considerably and that the glucose in some will spike with certain food and some won't.Kevin Hall (43:29):Well, of course that's been known for a long time that there's varying degrees of glucose tolerance. Just oral glucose tolerance tests that we've been doing for decades and decades we know is actually diagnostic, that we use variability in that response as diagnostic of type 2 diabetes.Eric Topol (43:49):I'm talking about within healthy people.Kevin Hall (43:53):But again, it's not too surprising that varying people. I mean, first of all, we have a huge increase in pre-diabetes, right? So there's various degrees of glucose tolerance that are being observed. But yeah, that is important physiology. I think the question then is within a given person, what kind of advice do we give to somebody about their lifestyle that is going to modulate those glucose responses? And if that's the only thing that you look at, then it seems like what ends up happening, even in the trials that use continuous glucose monitors, well big surprise, they end up recommending low carbohydrate diets, right? So that's the precision sort of nutrition advice because if that's the main metric that's being used, then of course we've all known for a very long time that lower carbohydrate diets lead to a moderated glucose response compared to higher carbohydrate diets. I think the real question is when you kind of ask the issue of if you normalize for glycemic load of these different diets, and there are some people that respond very differently to the same glycemic load meal compared to another person, is that consistent number one within that person?Kevin Hall (45:05):And our data suggests that you're going to have to repeat that same test multiple times to kind of get a consistent response and be able to make a sensible recommendation about that person should eat that meal in the future or not eat that meal in the future. And then second, what are you missing when that becomes your only metric, right? If you're very narrowly focused on that, then you're going to drive everybody to consume a very low carbohydrate diet. And as we know, that might be great for a huge number of people, but there are those that actually have some deleterious effects of that kind of diet. And if you're not measuring those other things or not considering those other things and put so much emphasis on the glucose side of the equation, I worry that there could be people that are being negatively impacted. Not to mention what if that one occasion, they ate their favorite food and they happen to get this huge glucose spike and they never eat it again, their life is worse. It might've been a complete aberration.Eric Topol (46:05):I think your practical impact point, it's excellent. And I think one of the, I don't know if you agree, Kevin, but one of the missing links here is we see these glucose spikes in healthy people, not just pre-diabetic, but people with no evidence of glucose dysregulation. And we don't know, they could be up to 180, 200, they could be prolonged. We don't know if the health significance of that, and I guess someday we'll learn about it. Right?Kevin Hall (46:36):Well, I mean that's the one nice thing is that now that we have these devices to measure these things, we can start to make these correlations. We can start to do real science to say, what a lot of people now presume is the case that these spikes can't be good for you. They must lead to increased risk of diabetes. It's certainly a plausible hypothesis, but that's what it is. We actually need good data to actually analyze that. And at least that's now on the table.Eric Topol (47:04):I think you're absolutely right on that. Well, Kevin, this has been a fun discussion. You've been just a great leader in nutrition science. I hope you'll keep up your momentum because it's pretty profound and I think we touched on a lot of the uncertainties. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wish I did?Kevin Hall (47:23):I mean, we could go on for hours, I'm sure, Eric, but this has been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate your interest. Thank you.Eric Topol (47:30):Alright, well keep up the great stuff. We'll be following all your work in the years ahead, and thanks for joining us on Ground Truths today.**************************************Footnote, Stay Tuned: Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall have a book coming out next September titled “WHY WE EAT? Thank you for reading, listening and subscribing to Ground Truths.If you found this fun and informative please share it!All content on Ground Truths—its newsletters, analyses, and podcasts, are free, open-access.Paid subscriptions are voluntary. All proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. I welcome all comments from paid subscribers and will do my best to respond to them and any questions.Thanks to my producer Jessica Nguyen and to Sinjun Balabanoff for audio and video support at Scripps Research.Note on Mass Exodus from X/twitter:Many of you have abandoned the X platform for reasons that I fully understand. While I intend to continue to post there because of its reach to the biomedical community, I will post anything material here in the Notes section of Ground Truths on a daily basis and cover important topics in the newsletter/analyses. You can also find my posts at Bluesky: @erictopol.bsky.social, which is emerging as an outstanding platform for sharing life science. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israel's current Prime Minister and a former Defence Minister, adding yet another layer of complexity to an already fraught geopolitical landscape. Meanwhile, speculation grows about a potential ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, aimed at bringing a fragile quiet to the north. Yonit and Jonathan are also joined by two widely admired journalists: Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times, who says the second Trump presidency could spell either opportunity or disaster for Israel, and Ilana Dayan of Israel's Channel 12, who gives an exclusive, English-language reading of a landmark speech she delivered last week at the Weizmann Institute to huge acclaim. Plus: this week's mensch award nominee is brave - and the chutzpah award is fruity. -- You can watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/POZkVIhTwHM Subscribe to our Substack: https://unholypodcast.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unholypodcast/ X: https://x.com/2jewsonthenews Join our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1150578065793142See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr. Jonathan (Jony) Kipnis is a BJC Investigator and the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He is also Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Neurosurgery and Director of the Brain Immunology and Glia Center there. Jony is a neuroimmunologist. He works at the intersection of the immune system and the nervous system. The brain controls immune system activity, and the immune system affects brain function. The two work together to ensure our survival and well-being. Jony's research is improving our understanding of how they interact when we're healthy and in cases of nervous system damage or disease. When he's not working, Jony loves to read a good book, enjoy a nice glass of wine, cook, and eat delicious food. He particularly has a passion for grilling. He completed his BSc in Biology at Tel Aviv University, and he received his MSc in Neurobiology and PhD in Neuroimmunology from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Jony worked on the faculty at the University of Virginia for over a decade before joining the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. He has received numerous awards and honors, including an NIH/NIA MERIT Award, the NIH Director's Pioneer Award, the Harrison Foundation Distinguished Teaching Professorship in Neuroscience, a Gutenberg Research College fellowship from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, and the Distinguished Research Career Development Award from the University of Virginia. He is also a Member of the National Academy of Medicine. In this interview, Jony shares more about his life and science.

Have you ever been interested in getting personalized health data to help you live a longer, healthier life? Then you need to know about InsideTracker, which is what I dive into today with guest Dr. Gil Blander.  We discuss the importance of biomarkers and personalized analytics in optimizing health and the benefits of a holistic approach. We also discuss the importance of building muscle, the value of supplements based on individual needs, and the role of InsideTracker in providing personalized recommendations for a healthier life.  Dr. Gil Blander, Chief Scientific Officer at InsideTracker, is internationally recognized for his research in the basic biology of aging and for translating his discoveries into new ways of detecting and preventing age-related conditions. He received a PhD in biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at MIT.    Thank you to our sponsors: ReNewU Interest List: Join for free here https://products.ambershaw.com/signature-waitlist  Join Crush Life Boot Camp: https://products.ambershaw.com/crushlife  Kroma Wellness: Use code AMB_KROMA20 for 20% off when shopping https://kromawellness.com   Find more from Dr. Gil Blander: Website:  https://www.insidetracker.com/  Instagram: @gilblander @insidetracker Podcast: Longevity By Design   Find more from Amber: Instagram: @msambershaw TikTok: @msambershaw Website: ambershaw.com    What We Discuss: 07:33 The Goal: Helping Humans Live Better and Longer 10:02 The Importance of Early Intervention and Monitoring Biomarkers 18:13 Building Muscle for Longevity and Overall Health 26:12 Supplements: Personalized Approach Based on Individual Needs 33:14 The Role of the Microbiome and Personalized Superfoods 45:48 InsideTracker: Personalized Recommendations for Health Optimization  

Did you like the episode? Text us a message! This month Alicia Rojas tells us about her journey from Costa Rica to Israel and back, in search of pathogens and parasitesAlicia shares the personal difficulties of being far from home and how she missed family and foodShe reflects on coming back to Costa Rica to explore its rich biodiversityShe recalls the challenges of returning from a luxurious postdoc at the Weizmann Institute to setting up her own lab in Costa Rica during a pandemicShe discusses the need to be resilient and creative and build collaborationsShe is proud to be “doing the best we can with the limited resources we have”As a mentor, she stresses that every student is different and she tries to keep a helicopter-view of everything that is going on Alicia gets up really early to complete work and make time for her family in the afternoonShe recommends to finish one task before you start the next oneShe mentioned these labs, scientists and institutionsUniversity of Costa Rica : https://www.ucr.ac.cr/Hebrew University of Jerusalem : https://en.huji.ac.il/Neta Regev-Rudzki laboratory : https://www.weizmann.ac.il/Biomolecular_Sciences/regev/Weizmann Institute of Science: https://www.weizmann.ac.il/pages/Research Center for Tropical Diseases.  : http://www.ciet.ucr.ac.cr/en/about-cietTo find out more about Alicia visit these links Alicia's lab : https://www.thetropicalwormlab.com/Alicia's LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicia-rojas-30215b1aa/On Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/thetropicalwormlab_ucr/On Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/thetropicalwormlabUCR/You want to support our work ? Buy us a coffee ! ==> https://www.buymeacoffee.com/lonelypipetteTo find out more about Renaud and Jonathan : Twitter : https://twitter.com/LePourpre LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudpourpre/ Twitter : https://twitter.com/Epigenetique LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanweitzman/%20 More about the soundtrack :Music by Amaria - Lovely Swindler https://soundcloud.com/amariamusique/

Want to learn about the science of love? My podcast guest, Dr. Liat Yakir is a biologist, author, and lecturer specializing in the biology of emotions. She holds advanced degrees in genetics and hormone research from the Weizmann Institute of Science.  Her new bestselling book, "A Brief History of Love," has been translated into multiple languages. Dr. Yakir participated as an expert in the Israeli version of the reality show 'Married at First Sight'. She also hosts a popular podcast – BrainStory. In this episode of Last First Date Radio: The biological definition of love What attracts us Why desire and passion decline in a long term-relationship Insights from biology to maintain long-term relationships The scientific prescription for love Connect with Dr. Yakir Website: http://en.liatyakir.com  IG https://www.instagram.com/dr_liatyakir/  FB https://www.facebook.com/liatyakir5976  Brief History of Love Book https://amzn.to/3VEFoiR  Use coupon lastfirstdate for 15% off of Dr. Yakir's course about finding and maintaining love https://en.liatyakir.com/courses/ ►Please subscribe/rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts http://bit.ly/lastfirstdateradio  ►If you're feeling stuck in dating and relationships and would like to find your last first date, sign up for a complimentary 45-minute breakthrough session with Sandy https://lastfirstdate.com/application  ►Join Your Last First Date on Facebook https://facebook.com/groups/yourlastfirstdate  ►Get Sandy's books, Becoming a Woman of Value; How to Thrive in Life and Love https://bit.ly/womanofvaluebook  and Choice Points in Dating https://amzn.to/3jTFQe9  ►Get FREE coaching on the podcast! https://bit.ly/LFDradiocoaching  ►FREE download: “Top 10 Reasons Why Men Suddenly Pull Away” http://bit.ly/whymendisappear  ►Group Coaching: https://lastfirstdate.com/the-woman-of-value-club/  ►Website → https://lastfirstdate.com/  ► Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/lastfirstdate1/  ►Get Amazon Music Unlimited FREE for 30 days at https://getamazonmusic.com/lastfirstdate   --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sandy-weiner9/message

Simplenight AI Presents: 5 Strategic Clusters of Venture Growth with Leon Eisen May 08 Guest: Leon Eisen, Venture Partner, Network.VC Leon Eisen, Venture Partner, Network.VC   / leoneisen   About Leon Eisen: Leon Eisen, Ph.D., is an inventor, serial entrepreneur, Chairman of Oxitone Medical, and Senator at the Grand Assembly of the World Business Angel Investment Forum (G20). He is also a partner at Network.VC and GVI Investments, strategic executive adviser and keynote speaker with a strong background in technology, business, and leadership spanning over 20 years. Dr. Eisen is a fellow member of the Royal Society of Medicine (UK) and serves as a Board Member of The Global Africa Leadership Council. Additionally, he holds membership in the Forbes Business Council and serves as a partner at GSD Venture Studios. He actively mentors aspiring entrepreneurs at accelerators like Gener8tor and H7 BioCapital, and holds an official mentorship role at the Israeli Export Institute. Furthermore, Leon Eisen is widely regarded for developing and popularizing a highly effective business growth methodology called "Quantum Business Thinking. Having earned a Ph.D. in physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Dr. Eisen also pursued business and entrepreneurship studies at Harvard Business School. He is widely recognized for inventing and successfully commercializing the world's first FDA-cleared wrist pulse oximetry monitor. With an impressive track record of over 30 worldwide patents and more than ten scientific publications, Leon Eisen has consistently delivered innovative products and made significant contributions in his field. #SimplenightAI #GaryFowler #VentureGrowth #LeonEisen #StrategicClusters #BusinessGrowth

Today we're embarking on a thrilling journey into the timeless legend of the Golem of Prague and its contemporary counterpart, the Golem of Rehovot. Along the way, we'll traverse through the captivating realms of graphic novels, cinematic masterpieces, and the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence. Sorelle recounts her mesmerizing encounter with the Golem of Rehovot at the prestigious Weizmann Institute of Science. Along the way, we confront profound questions surrounding control and Jewish power and responsibility from the vantage point of AI, contemporary technology, and the ongoing Hamas-Israel war.In our “Something for the Road,” J2‘s very own Yoni Millo shares his favorite Israeli book – which can also be enjoyed as a movie!Links for further reading:The Golem of Prague & The Golem of Rehovoth - Gershom Scholem, Commentary Magazine, January 1966The Maharal's Robot - Ro OranimGolem - Jay Michaelson, My Jewish LearningThe Golem - Y.L. PeretzFollow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn!Find more at j2adventures.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world. It is day 210 of the war with Hamas. Political correspondent Tal Schneider and archaeology reporter Gavriel Fiske join host Jessica Steinberg for today's episode. Schneider discusses the latest regarding aid for Gaza, brought in Thursday through Israel's Erez Crossing, rebuilt for trucks after being destroyed by Hamas on October 7, followed by the seizure of the aid by Hamas terrorists. She also describes the temporary floating pier being built by US troops on the Gaza shores for the transfer of additional aid. Schneider looks at Turkey's decision to halt all trade with Israel, a major blow for both countries given the annual $7 billion turnover in commercial trade, as Turkey erases all traces of Israel from its import and export systems after 75 years of trade. Fiske explains the complicated science of carbon-dating techniques utilized by a team at the Weizmann Institute who examined the rings of trees and other organic matter to determine the size and breadth of ancient Jerusalem. For the latest updates, please see The Times of Israel's ongoing live blog. Discussed articles include: US says Hamas seized first aid shipment that entered Gaza via reopened Erez crossing Turkey halts all trade with Israel; Jerusalem denounces ‘dictator' Erdogan New carbon-dating techniques enable ‘absolute chronology' of First Temple-era Jerusalem THOSE WE HAVE LOST: Civilians and soldiers killed in Hamas's onslaught on Israel THOSE WE ARE MISSING: The hostages and victims whose fate is still unknown Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.  IMAGE: A ship of Freedom Flotilla Coalition anchors at Tuzla seaport in Istanbul, Turkey on April 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this week's episode, Anna (https://twitter.com/annarrose) and Kobi (https://twitter.com/kobigurk) chat with Gal Arnon (https://galarnon42.github.io/), Ph.D student from the Weizmann Institute of Science (https://weizmann.ac.il/pages/) & Giacomo Fenzi (https://twitter.com/GiacomoFenzi), Ph.D. student in the COMPSEC Lab (https://compsec.epfl.ch/) at EPFL (https://epfl.ch/). Gal and Giacomo are amongst the co-authors of ‘STIR: Reed–Solomon Proximity Testing with Fewer Queries' (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/390) and in this conversation, they discuss how their research led them to work on these topics and where the thesis for this particular work sparked from. They set the stage by exploring the history of FRI and discussing some hidden nuances in how FRI works. And then they introduce STIR, a system that can be used in place of FRI, which incorporates various optimisations to improve the performance. Here's some additional links for this episode: FRIDA: Data Availability Sampling from FRI by Hall-Andersen, Simkin and Wagner (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/248.pdf) Lattice-Based Polynomial Commitments: Towards Asymptotic and Concrete Efficiency by Fenzi, Moghaddas and Nguyen (https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/846.pdf) DEEP-FRI: Sampling Outside the Box Improves Soundness by Ben-Sasson, Goldberg, Kopparty and Saraf (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/336.pdf) Proximity Gaps for Reed–Solomon Codes by Ben-Sasson, Carmon, Ishai, Kopparty and Saraf (https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/654.pdf) IOPs with Inverse Polynomial Soundness Error by Arnon, Chiesa and Yogev (https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1062.pdf) Episode 293: Exploring Security of ZK Systems with Nethermind's Michał & Albert (https://zeroknowledge.fm/293-2/) Circle STARKs by Haböck, Levit and Papini (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/278.pdf) Episode 304: Exploring FRI, LogUp and using M31 for STARKs with Ulrich Haböck (https://zeroknowledge.fm/304-2/) FRI-Binius: Improved Polynomial Commitments for Binary Towers (https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/fri-binius) The next ZK Hack IRL is happening May 17-19 in Kraków, apply to join now at zkkrakow.com (https://www.zkkrakow.com/) Aleo (http://aleo.org/) is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/ (http://aleo.org/) If you like what we do: * Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree (https://linktr.ee/zeroknowledge) * Subscribe to our podcast newsletter (https://zeroknowledge.substack.com) * Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) * Join us on Telegram (https://zeroknowledge.fm/telegram) * Catch us on YouTube (https://zeroknowledge.fm/)

In science, the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists were announced this week. the prestigious award went to three scientist from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel in recognition of their groundbreaking work in various fields. Each recipient will also receive a 100 thousand dollar prize.  We spoke with one of the recipients, Dr. Moran Shalev-Benami, a senior scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who is working on sensing and signaling mechanisms in the brain that may help treat appetite disorders.(photo: Blavatnik Awards) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the latest episode of the Food Professor Podcast, presented by Caddle, the show delves into the evolving landscape of the food industry, emphasizing innovative approaches to food production and consumption.This episode features a special guest, Ori Cohavi, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Remilk from Israel, discussing the groundbreaking development of lab-grown milk recently approved for sale in Canada by the CFIA, marking a significant step in food technology.The podcast also explores recent research conducted with Caddle, focusing on food discounting and rescue. Key findings include a 32% increase in average visit frequency since 2018, highlighting a shift towards more frequent shopping, potentially influenced by cash-flow shopping, deal hunting, and or the increase in remote work allowing for less batched shopping trips.Further discussions touch upon the latest figures on food inflation, with Canada's food inflation rate at its lowest since October 2021, presenting a comparative analysis with other countries and highlighting the global perspective on food prices. The episode also humorously references Canada's Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, Lawrence MacAulay, and his viral lobster-eating picture from his Malaysia promotional tour.Lastly, Beyond Meat's latest product iteration aims to revitalize the brand with healthier options. This episode of the Food Professor Podcast presents a comprehensive overview of current trends and challenges in the food sector, blending expert insights with critical analysis of consumer behaviour, industry practices, and technological innovations. About OriDr. Ori Cohavi's career has been shaped by a belief in the power of science to save lives, solve today's most pressing challenges, and transform the world we share. Cohavi received his doctorate and PhD in biochemistry, with a focus on functional structure of proteins, from the world-renowned Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.Cohavi spent the early part of his career developing life-saving drugs for rare diseases before shifting focus to address one of our world's most pressing and fundamental challenges: food security.As Chief Technology Officer, Cohavi and fellow co-founder Aviv Wolff are reimagining the future of food and disrupting the 900+ billion-dollar dairy category. Remilk pioneered an environmentally friendly yeast-based fermentation process to produce animal-free milk proteins free of lactose, cholesterol and growth hormones. Cohavi heads Remilk's R&D strategy and leads the a team of accomplished scientists and researchers. This team already has submitted several patent applications in connection with their work. Prior to joining Remilk, Cohavi served as head of Mitoconix Bio's drug development team, and as a senior researcher at Semorex Technologies. About UsDr. Sylvain Charlebois is a Professor in food distribution and policy in the Faculties of Management and Agriculture at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He is also the Senior Director of the Agri-food Analytics Lab, also located at Dalhousie University. Before joining Dalhousie, he was affiliated with the University of Guelph's Arrell Food Institute, which he co-founded. Known as “The Food Professor”, his current research interest lies in the broad area of food distribution, security and safety. Google Scholar ranks him as one of the world's most cited scholars in food supply chain management, food value chains and traceability.He has authored five books on global food systems, his most recent one published in 2017 by Wiley-Blackwell entitled “Food Safety, Risk Intelligence and Benchmarking”. He has also published over 500 peer-reviewed journal articles in several academic publications. Furthermore, his research has been featured in several newspapers and media groups, including The Lancet, The Economist, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC, NBC, ABC, Fox News, Foreign Affairs, the Globe & Mail, the National Post and the Toronto Star.Dr. Charlebois sits on a few company boards, and supports many organizations as a special advisor, including some publicly traded companies. Charlebois is also a member of the Scientific Council of the Business Scientific Institute, based in Luxemburg. Dr. Charlebois is a member of the Global Food Traceability Centre's Advisory Board based in Washington DC, and a member of the National Scientific Committee of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) in Ottawa.About MichaelMichael is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc. and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada and the Bank of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience with Levi's, Black & Decker, Hudson's Bay, Today's Shopping Choice and Pandora Jewellery.Michael has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. He has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions with C-level executives and participated worldwide in thought leadership panels. ReThink Retail has added Michael to their prestigious Top Global Retail Influencers list for 2024 for the fourth year in a row.Michael is also the president of Maven Media, producing a network of leading trade podcasts, including Remarkable Retail , with best-selling author Steve Dennis, now ranked one of the top retail podcasts in the world.Based in San Francisco, Global eCommerce Leaders podcast explores global cross-border issues and opportunities for eCommerce brands and retailers.Last but not least, Michael is the producer and host of the "Last Request Barbeque" channel on YouTube, where he cooks meals to die for - and collaborates with top brands as a food and product influencer across North America

Save 20% on all Nuzest Products WORLDWIDE with the code MIKKIPEDIA at www.nuzest.co.nz, www.nuzest.com.au or www.nuzest.comThis week on the podcast Mikki speaks to Gil Blander, the founder of InsideTracker, a revolutionary platform that empowers individuals to optimise their health by tracking and improving their biomarkers. Gil shares his  journey into the world of longevity and health, shedding light on how InsideTracker is pioneering personalised health optimisation. We discuss Gil's passion for longevity, the science behind biomarkers used in Inside Tracker, how personalised health data can lead to significant behaviour change, their own InnerAge calculation as a behaviour change tool and their published research include the bio signatures of endurance runners. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the cutting edge of health optimisation, longevity science, and personal wellbeing. Gil Blander, Ph.D., is an internationally recognised biologist, longevity expert, and the founder of InsideTracker. With a profound passion for aging research and personalised health, Gil has dedicated over two decades to exploring the science of longevity and biomarker analysis. Holding a Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science and having conducted postdoctoral research at MIT, Gil's academic and professional journey has been focused on the intersection of biology, technology, and health optimisation. Through InsideTracker, he aims to empower individuals to take control of their health by providing them with personalised, data-driven insights to live longer, healthier lives. Gil's work has been featured in major publications, and he continues to be a leading voice in the fields of biotechnology and personalised health.Gil: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gilblander/Inside Tracker: https://www.insidetracker.com/Longevity by Design https://info.insidetracker.com/podcast Contact Mikki:https://mikkiwilliden.com/https://www.facebook.com/mikkiwillidennutritionhttps://www.instagram.com/mikkiwilliden/https://linktr.ee/mikkiwillidenCurranz supplement: MIKKI saves you 25% at www.curranz.co.nz or www.curranz.co.uk ooff your first order

Matt Greenwood, Chief Innovation Officer & Head of Investment Management Engineering @ Two Sigma shares some of the most unique and valuable cultural practices behind how the engineering org operates at Two Sigma. We discuss strategies that prepare you for scaling (like intentional relationship-building with your front-line managers); examples of how Two Sigma successfully deployed the “Inverse Conway Maneuver,” how to reinforce a consensus-driven culture from early-days to 1000+, how to navigate both large & small reorgs; and why Two Sigma made the intentional decision to rebrand their R&D org as M&E (modeling & engineering)! Plus, Matt's approach to full-bodied problem-solving.ABOUT MATT GREENWOODMatt is Chief Innovation Officer and Head of Investment Management Engineering at Two Sigma. He joined Two Sigma in 2003 and since then has led a number of company-wide efforts in both engineering and modeling. Matt is also an Advisor at Two Sigma Ventures and works closely with the business' portfolio companies as a board member and advisor.Matt began his career at Bell Labs and later moved to IBM Research, where he was responsible for a number of early efforts in tablet computing and distributed computing. In 2000, Matt was lead developer and manager for Entrisphere, Inc., where he helped create a product providing access equipment for broadband service providers. Matt earned a BA and MA in Math from Oxford University, and a Master's degree in Theoretical Physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He also holds a PhD in Mathematics from Columbia University, where he taught for many years."We came to New York in 2003, nothing was happening in New York. Silicon Alley, as they called it back then was just kaput. Then one day, I was browsing Craigslist, because that's what you did in 2003, and there was a little ad, ‘Hedge fund, looking for excellent engineers.' So I was like, 'All right, maybe.' I said to my wife, 'This is either the sketchiest thing ever or the best decision of my life. It's one of those two things.' On Craigslist, there's no other way you can be, right? And it was probably the best decision of my life.”- Matt Greenwood   This episode is brought to you by incident.ioincident.io is trusted by hundreds of tech-led companies across the globe, including Etsy, monday.com, Skyscanner and more to seamlessly orchestrate incident response from start to finish. Intuitively designed, and with powerful and flexible built-in workflow automation, companies use incident.io to supercharge incident response and up-level the entire organization.Learn more about how you can better identify, learn from, and respond to incidents at incident.ioInterested in joining an ELC Peer Group?ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers.Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroupsSHOW NOTES:Matt's eng leadership journey & discovering Two Sigma on Craigslist (3:34)Key moments of Two Sigma's evolution as an org that sparked excitement (7:26)Lessons learned on keeping your work exciting by focusing on “human problems” (10:25)Create a culture of investing in people's growth across longer timelines (12:22)How Sigma Two intentionally structures its R&D org (15:18)An unexpected way to prepare for scaling your org - intentional relationship-building strategies for your first-line managers (18:10)Frameworks for deploying the inverse Conway maneuver (20:56)The right people / conversations for small & large reorgs (23:30)Consensus-driven culture at 1000+, approaches to create buy-in & ownership with organizational change (26:02)Two Sigma's approach to full-bodied problem solving (30:26)Rapid fire questions (34:06)LINKS AND RESOURCESWhalefall - A scientifically accurate thriller from Daniel Kraus about a scuba diver who's been swallowed by an eighty-foot, sixty-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out.This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

EPISODE 1944: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Ehud Shapiro, a computer scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, about the egalitarian architecture necessary to build genuine digital democracy Ehud Shapiro is a multi-disciplinary scientist, artist, entrepreneur and a Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. With international reputation, he made fundamental contributions to many scientific disciplines. Ehud was also an Internet pioneer, a successful Internet entrepreneur, and a pioneer and proponent of e-democracy. Ehud is the founder of the Ba Rock Band and conceived its original artistic program. He is a winner of two European Research Council Advanced Grants.

Daniel is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 25 years of technology, retail and consumer goods experience. The past few years have been spent focused on Digital Disruption and E-commerce + omni-channel businesses in consumer goods industry In 2017 Daniel was part of the founding team of Byte - a Direct to Consumer Dental Aligner Brand. The team build the business over three years and exited in December 2020 for $1.04bn. www.byteme.com Daniel is also the co-founder and co-CEO of dLuxury Brands. dLuxury invests in Digitally Native Brands + has an accelerator to help turbo charge digital marketing for brands. www.dluxurybrands.com Daniel also advises a number of Private Equity funds on acquisitions and Investments in the Digital space, and advises and sits on multiple Boards. Daniel has spoken at many conferences around the world, been featured in many news outlets, and has represented the UK Government as an ambassador for trade and industry in a major advertising campaign they ran. Daniel was invited to join the Prime Minister, David Cameron's trip to China in 2013 and met many Chinese Dignitaries. Daniel has been involved in many Charities, including being a member of the Board of the Weizmann Institute of Science for 10 years and Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) for 5 years. Daniel is an active member of the YPO (Young Presidents Organisation), an invite-only business group comprised of business leaders from around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well git on there little weirdo!  Welcome to THE RANCH!! It's spacious!  It's cozy!  It's FULL OF MONSTERS?! It's another week of KEEP IT WEIRD, the podcast for all things strange and unusual and this week we're home, home on the range!  Lauren starts us off with some VERY COOL science news in a segment we like to call the MAGIC SCHOOL BUS!  The bus often takes us down someone's throat or up someone's butt but today we are fortunate enough that we're just traveling into a petri dish.  Scientists at the Weizmann Institute just announced that they've successfully GROWN A HUMAN EMBRYO!! In a lab!! What does this mean?  Can we grow humans now?  Are they real people?  Are they clones??  All your questions will be answered! Ashley takes on her first WHERE IN THE WORLD (Is Keep It Weird Going?) and takes us to bright & sunny.... Arizona??  That's right, Rainbow Arizona to be exact, to check out the infamous STARDUST RANCH!  Where couple John and Joyce Edmonds lived for 20 long, hard years alongside aliens, ghosts, portals to other dimensions, and monsters that killed their pets.  Were they being abducted and experimented on?  Does Stardust Ranch contain portals to another world?  Who was the mysterious machete man?! Move over Skinwalker Ranch, there's another ranch in town. Check out some links below if you want to learn more about the stories and information shared in today's episode. Donate to our patreon at www.patreon.com/keepitweirdpodcast to help us produce this show and keep it going FOR ETERNITY.  You'll also get bonus episodes, discounts on merch, shoutouts on the show and be automatically entered into our contests! Follow us on social media @keepitweirdcast (Instagram, Twitter & Facebook) to stay up to date on episode releases and paranormal investigations! And if you're looking for that perfect Christmas gift head to our merch store at www.keepitweirdpodcast.com/merch!    Just What is an Embryo Anyway? https://www.bbc.com/news/health-66715669 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-65914934 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/06/complete-models-of-human-embryos-created-from-stem-cells-in-lab   Never Buy a Ranch https://realhorrordiaries.blogspot.com/2023/03/eerie-encounters-tales-of-stardust-ranch.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQA1hHTaa1Y https://www.nine.com.au/entertainment/viral/alien-stardust-ranch-sale-john-edmonds-arizona/3acfd1eb-fa65-46b1-90f8-6955cfdcca18 https://www.12news.com/article/features/former-resident-says-there-was-something-living-at-buckeye-alien-ranch/75-486285454 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1559154/Is-UFO-ranch-Alien-slayer-posts-mysterious-video.html http://www.bltresearch.com/plantab.php  

Dr. Jessica Rose is a Canadian researcher in applied mathematics, immunologist, computational biology and molecular biology. For the past three years she has been analzing the data in the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System  or VAERS to bring to public attention the safety signals of adverse reactions associated with the Covid-19 vaccines. She has presented her work to the European Parliament in Brussels, the FDA's Vaccines and Biological Products Advisory Committee and many international conferences. Twice she invited to give testimony to the US Senate, but was not permitted to enter the country due to her vaccination status required for non-American visitors. Dr. Rose is a graduate of the University of Newfoundland and Labrador, and received her doctorate from Bar Illan University in Israel and did additional studies and research at the Weizmann Institute, the University of Jerusalem, and Technicon Institute of Technology. She has been interviewed widely on alternative media outlets and writes for her blog at Jessicar.substack.com

Rachel Diamant co-founded EmendoBio and serves as Chief Business Officer. Rachel is responsible for EmendoBio's IP strategy, which she designed to generate an extensive patent portfolio to cover various novel aspects of the technology and products while also expertly navigating the IP space. In her role as CBO, Rachel also builds EmendoBio's pipeline of clinical programs and the academic and industrial collaborations and partnerships for the pre/clinical development of EmendoBio's selected indications and genomic targets. Rachel has extensive experience in constructing IP strategy that is designed to serve business objectives based on careful competitive landscaping to reduce risks and maximize value. In the private market, Rachel has been a consultant for numerous biotechnology and medical device companies and accumulated extensive expertise in IP mining, strategic portfolio design and hands-on portfolio management. Rachel holds an MSc in Neurobiology from the Weizmann Institute of Science and a Biotechnology Engineering degree from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/freeman-means-business/support

On today's episode, Dr. Jaime interviews Dr. Gil Blander!Dr. Gil Blander is internationally recognized for his research in the basic biology of aging and translating research discoveries into new ways of detecting and preventing age-related conditions. He leads a team of biology, nutrition & exercise physiology experts, and computer scientists at InsideTracker, and has been featured in CNN Money, The New York Times, Forbes, Financial times, The Boston Globe to name a few.Dr. Gil Blander received a Ph.D. in biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science and completed his Post Doctoral fellowship at MIT, before going on to found InsideTracker. The InsideTracker platform analyzes key biochemical and physiological markers and applies algorithms and large scientific databases to determine optimal zones for each marker. The system then provides nutrition, exercise, supplements and lifestyle interventions that empower people to optimize their markers, increasing vitality, improving overall health, as well as athletic performance and extending life.SPONSOR: Get 20% off SPARKLE WELLNESS products using code DRFIT at www.lovesparkle.life. Check out Sparkle Wellness' brand new Collagen for Bone Mineral Density. Dr. Jaime LOVES the NEW Osteoboost!!

Janine has been flexing her moxie muscle throughout her life. In every phase of her career, she has identified her strengths and pursued roles that would build on them. Her path has been a moxie mix of serendipity and strategy and an openness to embrace the opportunities presented to her. Janine also sees connections between people and the organizations she serves throughout her impressive public relations and marketing career. Through her creativity and vision of what's possible, she creates synergy.Janine has held a succession of positions in marketing/public relations and development, including Press Officer of Harrods (in London); Executive Vice President, Head of Corporate Communications, and a member of the Operating Committee of Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising; founder and President of Saatchi & Saatchi Public Relations; and founder and CEO of her own eponymous marketing public relations agency specializing in luxury goods, healthcare and not-for-profit. Her clients included Kiehl's, Shiseido Cosmetics, The Platinum Guild, The Capital Grille, Time Inc., Johnson & Johnson, McNeil Consumer Products, Mayo Clinic and the Weizmann Institute of Science.Having sold her public relations agency and “retired,” Janine and her husband relocated from New York City to Miami.  She now serves on the Board of Trustees of Miami City Ballet and does pro bono marketing consulting for PAMM and Baptist Health. She is a member of the Century Association, Cosmopolitan Club, Economics Club of New York, Penn Club of New York City and, with her husband, Fisher Island Club and Yale Club of New York City.This episode of Main Street Moxie is proudly sponsored by Elyse Harney Real Estate and Kindred Property Care.

Iniziamo il programma di oggi passando in rassegna alcune delle notizie più importanti della settimana. Parleremo, innanzitutto, della necessità per l'Europa di adottare una strategia comune in materia di sicurezza. Quindi, ripercorreremo le tappe più importanti del 18° vertice del G20, tenutosi a Nuova Delhi, in India, il 9 e 10 settembre, che ha visto come assenti d'eccezione i leader russi e cinesi. Nella sezione del programma dedicata alla scienza, commenteremo i risultati rivoluzionari di uno studio condotto da un gruppo di ricercatori del Weizmann Institute in Israele. Il team di scienziati è stato in grado di sviluppare un modello di embrione umano senza l'uso di sperma, ovuli o utero. Infine, concluderemo la prima parte del nostro programma rivivendo i momenti salienti del torneo US Open 2023.    La prima notizia riguarda una polemica sollevata dall'attore italiano, Pierfrancesco Favino, durante l'80° edizione della Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica di Venezia, che si è detto contrario all'ingaggio di attori stranieri per l'interpretazione di personaggi italiani. Quindi, rimarremo ancora a Venezia e parleremo dell'approvazione, da parte del Consiglio comunale del capoluogo veneto, di una "tassa di accesso" di 5 euro, pensata per far fronte ai disagi dovuti al sovraffollamento turistico. L'intento è quello di migliorare la qualità di vita dei residenti e rendere più piacevole l'esperienza dei visitatori che soggiornano a Venezia. - L'Europa fatica a ottimizzare gli aumenti della spesa per la difesa - L'India ospita con successo il vertice del G-20 senza i leader di Cina e Russia - I ricercatori coltivano un intero modello di embrione umano a partire da cellule staminali - Novak Djokovic e Coco Gauff vincono il singolare degli US Open 2023 - Il dibattito sugli attori stranieri che interpretano personaggi italiani - Venezia approva il “contributo d'accesso” per contenere il turismo giornaliero

Dr. Jessica Rose, Dr. Joseph Fraiman, and Dr. Kelly Victory return to discuss concerns about the reliability of safety trials for mRNA vaccines, and why some experts are saying that its RCT (randomized controlled trials) asked all of the wrong questions. Dr. Joseph Fraiman is an emergency medical physician from Louisiana. He is the former Medical Manager of Louisiana's Urban Search Rescue Disaster Task Force 1. In a letter published in Vaccine, Dr. Fraiman led a group of physicians who warn “there are major shortcomings in the FDA's recent publication of its first “near real-time surveillance” study.” Follow him at https://twitter.com/JosephFraiman/ Dr. Jessica Rose is a Canadian researcher with a Bachelor's Degree in Applied Mathematics and a Master's degree in Immunology from Memorial University of Newfoundland. She also holds a PhD in Computational Biology from Bar Ilan University and 2 Post Doctoral degrees: one in Molecular Biology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one in Biochemistry from the Technion Institute of Technology. She was also accepted for a 2-month program as a senior researcher at the Weizmann Institute prior to completion of her latest post doctoral degree at the Technion. Her more recent research efforts are aimed at descriptive analysis of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data in efforts to make this data accessible to the public. Find Dr. Jessica Rose online at https://www.jessicasuniverse.com and https://jessicar.substack.com 「 SPONSORED BY 」 Find out more about the companies that make this show possible and get special discounts on amazing products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • COZY EARTH - Say goodbye to hot, restless nights with soft, temperature-regulating bedding from Cozy Earth. Susan and Drew love Cozy Earth's sheets made with super-soft viscose from bamboo! Use code DREW at checkout to save 40% at https://drdrew.com/cozy • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get an extra discount with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew • PRIMAL LIFE - Dr. Drew recommends Primal Life's 100% natural dental products to improve your mouth. Get a sparkling smile by using natural teeth whitener without harsh chemicals. For a limited time, get 60% off at https://drdrew.com/primal • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew • BIRCH GOLD - Don't let your savings lose value. You can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered retirement account, and Birch Gold will help you do it. Claim your free, no obligation info kit from Birch Gold at https://birchgold.com/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 ABOUT THE SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician with over 35 years of national radio, NYT bestselling books, and countless TV shows bearing his name. He's known for Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Teen Mom OG (MTV), Dr. Drew After Dark (YMH), The Masked Singer (FOX), multiple hit podcasts, and the iconic Loveline radio show. Dr. Drew Pinsky received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and his M.D. from the University of Southern California, School of Medicine. Read more at https://drdrew.com/about Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yonit and Jonathan are back from the summer break - and there is A LOT to talk about. Word of a possible climbdown by Benjamin Netanyahu on the judicial overhaul, an attempt to force out the head of Israel's Holocaust museum - and a massive scientific breakthrough from Israel's Weizmann Institute: senior researcher Prof Jacob (Yaqub) Hanna tells us how it happened and what it could mean for the human future. Plus: jaw dropping winners of our chutzpah and mensch awards and - of course - You're So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzva.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The team at the Weizmann Institute say the synthetic model looks like a textbook example of a real 14-day old embryo.

Patrick Frank's curiosity motivated his interest in sea squirts and science. After earning a PhD in physical science, Frank became a chemist at Stanford University. Hear his story about analyzing climate models and scrutinizing ideas where others are afraid. MORE ABOUT DR. PATRICK FRANK Patrick Frank is a physical methods experimental chemist. BS, MS, San Francisco State University; PhD, Stanford University; Bergmann Postdoctoral Fellow, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. As scientific staff at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Department of Chemistry, Stanford University, he has 67 peer-reviewed publications in bioinorganic chemistry. Achievements include explaining the unusual metal active site in blue copper electron transport proteins, falsification of rack-induced bonding theory, solving the 20-year problem of ligand binding in the iron-molybdenum cofactor of Nitrogenase, revision of 60 years of accepted wisdom about the solvation structure of dissolved cupric ion, and illuminating the ancient (Cambrian) biological chemistry of vanadium and sulfuric acid in blood cells of the sea squirt Ascidia ceratodes. He has also published peer-reviewed papers on the intelligent design myth, the science is philosophy myth, the noble savage myth, the human-caused global warming myth, the toxic masculinity myth, and the culture of sexual harassment among STEM academics myth.

Can an algorithm help us eat better? That's the question I'll be discussing with my guest today, Professor Eran Segal, a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS), heading a lab with computational biologists and experimental scientists who have extensive experience in machine learning and computational biology allowing them to decipher how something as complex as diet, interacts with something infinitely more complex … us.Our genes, microbes, and unique environments are obviously going to impact how we respond to different foods and diets and Professor Segal is on a mission to figure out how we can use his favouroite tool, algorithms, to help us eat according to our unique biology.We first dive into our unique blood sugar responses and their seminal paper published in Cell that demonstrated the drastically different responses we all have and potential reasons why. How we calculate GI and GL index and what's wrong these, what happens when we have high blood sugar excursions (after a high refined carb meal for example) and the dangers of gameifying our diet too much.Plus we look into the future with the Human Phenotype Project, the role of faecal transplants and I invite Professor to give us a snapshot of how we practice nutritional self-care in the future with all the ‘omics'.

 Sugar replacements, known generally as artificial sweeteners or non-nutritive sweeteners, have been in the news a lot. Rising concerns exist about safety and the effects of the sweeteners on many key features of health, including the microbiome. We need the help of talented scientists to sort through this complex web of information. Today's guest, Professor Eran Elinav, has done some of the seminal research in this area. He's an expert on systems immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Interview Summary So back in 2014, you and your colleagues published a study in the prestigious journal Nature showing that sweeteners could induce glucose intolerance - a highly concerning finding, What's more, they did so by changing the microbiome. Would you tell us a little bit more about this study and what subsequent researchers found. In the study that published in Nature back in 2014, we explored the consumption of several kinds of artificial sweeteners when administered to mice. We wanted to ask a very simple but important question - are dose formulations of hypersweet compounds, which are so massively consumed by humans, in fact being responded to by our gut microbes. We know from our other studies that gut microbes contain a very well-developed machinery that enables them to respond and to digest multiple very complex formulations of food. We asked ourselves whether these seemingly inherent compounds could induce changes in the gut microbiome that could impact the health of these mice. And indeed, when we tested this, we mainly focused on saccharin, but in several experiments saw that could also be true for other common artificial sweeteners. We saw that the gut microbiome of mice being given saccharin in different concentrations, (using different strains of mice and different obesity conditions) were indeed capable of reacting to saccharin, changing their microbiome composition and behavior accordingly, and in some cases, resulting in a very surprising, counterintuitive worsening of glucose control towards diabetes. That was very concerning to us, because many millions of people worldwide consume artificial sweeteners with an aim of satisfying their sweet tooth without having to pay the caloric price. Especially people who are prone or already suffer prediabetes or even type II diabetes. What we could show was that the gut microbiome in some configurations could actually drive a disturbed control of sugar levels in the blood of these mice, which could suggest that in some cases, the gut microbiome could actually be bad for you when you consume artificial sweeteners in terms of your sugar management. That is a landmark study by any standard, so congratulations for doing such important science. That was back in 2014. So what has research shown since then?  We were able to prove in that study that consumption of artificial sweeteners was not only associated with changes in the microbiome and with the trend towards altered sugar control, but it was actually costly. We did this by transferring microbiomes from mice that were exposed to saccharin or to other artificial sweeteners into mice that do not have any microbiome of their own. They're called germ-free mice. We could see that these recipient mice who never consumed artificial sweeteners were developing the same exact disturbances in their sugar control just by the exposure to microbes that were previously exposed to artificial sweeteners. Now, this was very surprising, very important, and also caused a lot of backfire from the industry as one would expect. But it led to an array of follow up studies by multiple groups, mainly in other mice models and utilizing other formulations of artificial sweeteners, which basically suggested that our observations were correct. Artificial sweeteners were not inert when given to mice in different contexts and disease states. Now, the biggest limitation of our original study and all these many follow up studies was that all of these experiments were conducted in mice. The billion-dollar question was, can we recapitulate these findings at least, to some extent, in the human setting? This prompted us to perform a very ambitious human clinical trial which took multiple years to complete. It was finally published a year ago. The take home from that study which focused on all four commonly consumed artificial sweeteners was the concept that we've highlighted almost a decade ago - it was correct when applied to humans. Those findings raise alarms on many different levels. I appreciate you sharing that information with us. Recently, the World Health Organization has expressed concern about the sweeteners and their impact on people's ability to control body weight and health, and even risk for cancer. One of the counters from people who are in favor of these sweeteners is that the doses provided in these studies are many times what a human might ordinarily consume. What do you say to that? I will say two important things. First, this may have been true in previous studies a decade ago in which we all started by testing artificial sweeteners at relatively high doses. However, with years of follow-up studies and the expanded field of the doses of tested artificial sweeteners that were in many cases, reduced to those below the recommended daily allowance in humans. And, in the controlled clinical trials published a year ago, doses of four artificial sweeteners that we supplemented our participants were well below the recommended daily allowance. And still in some people, we could see that these seemingly inherent compounds were able to reproducibly change the microbiome and to change to our configuration which could induce alterations in blood sugar control in these individuals. When those microbiomes were transferred to mice that had never seen artificial sweeteners, the microbiome integrations could also induce identical disturbances of blood sugar control in transfer mice. So, I think that our studies and plethora of other studies generate knowledge suggesting that artificial sweeteners may not be natural to the human body even when consumed in conservative doses. Well, thanks for that clarification. You mentioned some pushback from industry. Tell me what form that took. Was there a particular player in industry that was doing the pushback? Did you think that their concerns were valid? Well, I think that it is a natural part of the evolution of a set of discoveries that have a direct impact on human health and human nutrition. And also, of course, economic considerations. Some of the claims were less than fair, and others were more relevant. One needs to understand, and I'm saying this both as a physician and as a scientist, especially given our early studies, that you can make the best effort that you can and comprehensively try to tackle a question. But there are always things people can claim that were not done or should be done better. Science is not a one-shot profession. We come up with a discovery and then we build upon it, and others also come in, validate it, build upon it, and this was the process. So, I take everything with love. Many other people have experienced a healthy discussion with the industry, and I think we've all matured into understanding, at least in our group, we are not against artificial sweeteners or any other food compound. We are just keen and interested in learning how different food compounds including artificial sweeteners, impact our body in unforeseen ways, and we focus on the gut microbiome. This huge and poorly explored ecosystem, which we now understand is an integral part of our body, has amazing biochemical capacities to degrade and respond to almost any substance. With artificial sweeteners, I think that this revelation is actually very helpful to the industry because with this knowledge, and knowledge that is added by others, we are hopeful that by understanding that artificial sweeteners are not inert to the human bodies, we would be able, together with the industry or with whoever is interested in helping this effort, understand which formulations are safer than others. Which doses are safer than others; and which are the human populations at risk, who should think twice before they consume these compounds. While others could consume them and enjoy them with relatively little risk. I think this maturation of our knowledge and maturation of the field is, in general, a very positive one. So, with respect to the impact of these sweeteners on the microbiome, is there reason to have special concern about children? When we conduct human clinical trials, we're always hypersensitive about special populations at risk such as children, people who are incarcerated, and so on and so forth. We usually tend at least in groundbreaking first human trials, such as the one that we've conducted with artificial sweeteners, we try to avoid these at-risk populations just so our initial observations are based on populations that are not at special risks. So, children, as you know, are always a special population that we're even more concerned about than a general population. Our own setting was not inclusive of children, though our inclusion criteria included healthy adults 18 years of age and older. So, with respect to children, I can say that our own data did not explore them to date. But in general, we are always especially concerned about children. Any potential metabolic perturbation during that critical growth window for children is of special medical concern to us. Let me ask you one final, big-picture question. The defenders of these products are basically implying, if not sort of stating directly, that the pursuit of sweetness is a reasonable thing to have and that these products can deliver the sweetness that people enjoy, but potentially without negative effects. That's the position. But what about that basic proposition that the pursuit of sweetness is a reasonable thing to do, because couldn't one say that this pursuit, whether it's delivered or whether the remedy to wanting to have more sweetness comes from either sugar or artificial sweeteners, there is potential to be harmed. Wouldn't it make sense to just gradually reduce the level of sweetness in the food supply, so that people become accustomed to less sweet taste overall? I couldn't agree more with your statement. I have to say that our findings related to the non-inertness of artificial sweeteners and the potential adverse impacts on human metabolism do not imply in any form or shape that we recommend that people convert back from artificial sweetener into increased consumption of sugar. We know from endless medical literature that sugar is probably an ultimate evil when consumed in excess and is directly responsible for contribution to multiple human diseases including obesity, type II diabetes, fatty liver, and even other diseases including cancer. So going back to sugar would be a big mistake. But I totally agree with you that positioning the public opinion as one which must choose between two sweet solutions, either sugar or non-nutritive sweeteners as the only options, basically is biased because we as a post-industrial revolution human population, have dramatically increased our sugar consumption. I don't think that we need to choose between these two options. I personally opt to go back to water rather than choose between these two options which carry along probably adverse health consequences, at least in some human populations. Bio Eran Elinav is an Israeli immunologist and microbiota researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the German Cancer Research Centres. He is an international scholar at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advance Research. Elinav studies the molecular basis of host-microbiota interactions, and their effects of diet, environmental factors, immune function and host genetics on the intestinal microbiome and associated multi-factorial metabolic, inflammatory malignant and neurogenerative disease. His most-cited papers have more than 2,000 cites each. Elinav developed precision microbiota interventions, including Personalized Nutrition, Precision Probiotics, small molecule ″postbiotics″, Phage Therapy, autologous fecal microbiome transplantation, Vaginal Microbiome Transplantation (VMT) and gut epithelial interventions.  

Over the last week, news of “synthetic human embryos” has made headlines around the world. Science in Action is getting to the bottom of the sensational story. We talk to two of the researchers who have made the embryo models from stem cells in their labs; Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz from the University of Cambridge and California Institute of Technology, and Professor Jacob Hanna from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. They tell us how they made the embryo models, what their aims are, and their own ethical considerations. The scientific community is excited, but not surprised, by the breaking research. We hear how Dr Andreia Bernardo, group leader at Imperial College London, could use these structures in her future research. Finally, Director of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at Cambridge University, Professor Sarah Franklin, and Professor of Law at Stanford University, Hank Greely, tackle the legal and ethical constraints on this kind of work, and why it is important for understanding the health of mothers and babies. Photo Credit: Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz Lab Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Ella Hubber

Ryan Graves sits down with Professor Avi Loeb, a renowned scientist from Harvard University, to explore the fascinating world of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). As they delve into the profound implications of these mysterious phenomena, they discuss the need for a systematic survey of the sky, the potential technological nature of UAP, and the implications for our understanding of the universe. Join them on this enlightening journey as they probe the depths of UAP and its significance in shaping our perception of the cosmos.   Professor Loeb received a PhD in plasma physics at age 24 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1986) and was subsequently a long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1988-1993), where he started to work in theoretical astrophysics. In 1993 he moved to Harvard University where he was tenured three years later. He is now the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science and former chair of the department. Professor Loeb also holds a visiting professorship at the Weizmann Institute of Science and a Senior Professorship by special appointment in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University. Loeb has authored over 1000 research articles and 8 books. For full publications and biographies, visit his professional site. https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/   ===   Ryan Graves: Americans for Safe Aerospace: https://www.safeaerospace.org AIAA UAP: https://www.aiaauap.org Twitter: @uncertainvector Connect with Us: Website: http://www.mergedpodcast.com Merged Point: https://www.mergedpoint.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 15-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, from Sunday through Thursday. Military correspondent Emanuel Fabian and health reporter Renee Ghert-Zand join host Amanda Borschel-Dan in today's episode. Monday morning an Israeli helicopter gunship carried out rare strikes in Jenin after six Palestinians were killed and eight Israeli troops were wounded during heavy clashes. Fabian debriefs. On Sunday, six Israelis who regained their eyesight thanks to donor corneas had a chance to thank the donors' families in person. All donors were recent victims of Palestinian terror shootings, including the family of siblings Yagel and Hillel Yaniv, as well as the Dee family, who donated mother Lucy Dee's corneas. Who were some of the recipients? After a decade of work, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science say they have managed to create stem cell-derived human embryo models outside the uterus. How do these models differ from "natural" human embryos? Discussed articles include: 5 Palestinians dead, 8 IDF troops hurt in Jenin battle; Apache carries out airstrikes Families of terror victims Yaniv brothers, Lucy Dee meet recipients of their corneas In breakthrough, Israeli scientists say they synthesized human embryos from stem cells Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on iTunes, Spotify, PlayerFM, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts. IMAGE: An Israeli Air Force AH-64 Apache attack helicopter releases flares during an Israeli army raid in Jenin in the West Bank on June 19, 2023. (Jaafar ASHTIYEH / AFP)See omny.fm/listener for privacy information.

Do you have what it takes to climb into the C-Suite? If you make it there will you stay? A recent study shows that for every woman at the director level who gets promoted, two women directors are choosing to leave their company. Join us as we share our suspicions as to why. Give WISEcast some monthly listener support or make a one-time donation  →Paypal. Rachel Diamant is the co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Emendo Biotherapeutics, a next-generation gene editing company that targets genes with unprecedented levels of precision and efficacy. Operating in a field that is largely dominated by men, Rachel has emerged as a true innovator and leader, helping to position Emendo as a key player that is set to disrupt the landscape of gene therapies in the coming years. Rachel drives Emendo's strategy, science, and clinical programs essential to positioning Emendo as an attractive opportunity for investors and partners alike. Rachel holds an MSc in Neurobiology from the Weizmann Institute of Science and a Biotechnology Engineering degree from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. WISEcast is featured as one of the top 10 podcasts from the 60 Best Women in STEM Podcasts by Feedspot! Check out The Wisest Children on YouTube and see how our young scientist proteges are making science accessible and fun through some STEM activities for kids! You can connect with us on: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn or by email at thewisestwomen@gmail.com. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thewisestwomen/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thewisestwomen/support

Huberman Lab Key Takeaways The human sense of smell is innately extremely sensitive and can be trained to be even more sensitive, especially in the absence of other senses (like vision or hearing)Every time you meet someone you are taking chemicals from that person and applying it to your own body to process information about that person – this may explain why some people become “fast friends” or click right awayIf you lose your sense of smell for 1-1.5 years, it's unlikely you'll ever get it back; it's a ‘use it or lose it' systemLoss of smell is an early indicator of neurological degeneration and diseaseWe're constantly shifting our nasal cycle AKA which nostril we use most through a mechanism driven by the sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous systemInformation processing & cognition is linked to our olfactory systemWe are always sensing our own odor clouds to change our cognition and behavior – whether you realize it or notIn our most basic behaviors, we follow our nose not our eyes: if a food is visually appealing but smells bad, we are less likely to eat it; we'll be more attracted to a romantic partner who smells pleasant regardless of looks versus a potential partner who looks nice but smells badThe future of digitized olfaction may be used in medical diagnoses (but nowhere in the near future)Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgIn this episode, my guest is Noam Sobel, PhD, professor of neurobiology in the department of brain sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Dr. Sobel explains his lab's research on the biological mechanisms of smell (“olfaction”) and how sensing odorants and chemicals in our environment impacts human behavior, cognition, social connections, and hormones. He explains how smell is a crucial component of “social sensing” and how we use olfaction when meeting new people to determine things about their physiology and psychology, and he explains how this impacts friendships and romantic partners. He explains how smell influences emotions, hormone levels, memories and the relationship between breathing and autonomic homeostasis. He describes how smell-based screening tests can aid disease diagnosis and explains his lab's work on digitization of smell — which may soon allow online communication to include “sending of odors” via the internet. Dr. Sobel's work illustrates how sensitive human olfaction is and how it drives much of our biology and behavior. For the full show notes, visit hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1 (Athletic Greens): https://athleticgreens.com/huberman ROKA: https://roka.com/huberman Thesis: https://takethesis.com/huberman Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/huberman InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/huberman Supplements from Momentous https://www.livemomentous.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Dr. Noam Sobel (00:03:46) Sponsors: ROKA, Thesis, Helix Sleep (00:06:46) Olfaction Circuits (Smell) (00:14:49) Loss & Regeneration of Smell, Illness (00:21:39) Brain Processing of Smell (00:24:40) Smell & Memories (00:27:52) Sponsor: AG1 (Athletic Greens) (00:29:07) Humans & Odor Tracking (00:39:25) The Alternating Nasal Cycle & Autonomic Nervous System (00:48:18) Cognitive Processing & Breathing (00:54:47) Neurodegenerative Diseases & Olfaction (01:00:12) Congenital Anosmia (01:05:01) Sponsor: InsideTracker (01:06:19) Handshaking, Sharing Chemicals & Social Sensing (01:15:07) Smelling Ourselves & Smelling Others (01:22:02) Odors & Romantic Attraction (01:24:58) Vomeronasal Organ, “Bruce Effect” & Miscarriage (01:40:20) Social Chemo-Signals, Fear (01:50:26) Chemo-Signaling, Aggression & Offspring (02:03:57) Menstrual Cycle Synchronization (02:12:11) Sweat, Tears, Emotions & Testosterone (02:27:46) Science Politics (02:37:54) Food Odors & Nutritional Value (02:45:34) Human Perception & Odorant Similarity (02:52:12) Digitizing Smell, COVID-19 & Smell (03:05:50) Medical Diagnostic Future & Olfaction Digitization (03:10:55) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Momentous, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac Disclaimer

Synopsis: Harlan Robins, Ph.D., is the CSO and Co-Founder of Adaptive Biotechnologies, a pioneer and leader in immune-driven medicine that aims to improve people's lives by learning from the wisdom of their adaptive immune systems. Adaptive's proprietary immune profiling platform reveals and translates insights from our adaptive immune systems with unprecedented scale and precision. Harlan discusses how he navigated the ups and downs of co-founding a company. He talks about the adaptive immune system, why it's important, and what Adaptive is currently working on from a development perspective. He also discusses Adaptive's partnership with Genentech to create personalized cancer therapies. Biography: Dr. Harlan Robins is the Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder of Adaptive Biotechnologies, a commercial-stage biotech company that aims to translate the genetics of the adaptive immune system into clinical products to diagnose and treat disease. Prior to co-founding Adaptive, Harlan served in various roles at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) in the Computational Biology Program, including Assistant Faculty Member, Associate, and Full Member and Head of the program. Harlan holds a BS in Physics from Harvard University and a master's degree and PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, with a visiting appointment to the California Institute of Technology. Harlan received postdoctoral appointments in the particle theory group at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Interested in the mathematics behind genetics and observing the potential utility of high-level mathematics to study problems in the biological sciences, Harlan took another postdoctoral appointment at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton under famed biologist Dr. Arnold Levine. With Dr. Levine, he concentrated on developing bioinformatic algorithms for micro RNA targets and bacterial genome analysis, a precursor to his faculty appointment at FHCRC in the Computational Biology Group, Public Health Sciences and Human Biology Divisions.

In this episode, my guest is Noam Sobel, PhD, professor of neurobiology in the department of brain sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Dr. Sobel explains his lab's research on the biological mechanisms of smell (“olfaction”) and how sensing odorants and chemicals in our environment impacts human behavior, cognition, social connections, and hormones. He explains how smell is a crucial component of “social sensing” and how we use olfaction when meeting new people to determine things about their physiology and psychology, and he explains how this impacts friendships and romantic partners. He explains how smell influences emotions, hormone levels, memories and the relationship between breathing and autonomic homeostasis. He describes how smell-based screening tests can aid disease diagnosis and explains his lab's work on digitization of smell — which may soon allow online communication to include “sending of odors” via the internet. Dr. Sobel's work illustrates how sensitive human olfaction is and how it drives much of our biology and behavior. For the full show notes, visit hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1 (Athletic Greens): https://athleticgreens.com/huberman ROKA: https://roka.com/huberman Thesis: https://takethesis.com/huberman Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/huberman InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/huberman Supplements from Momentous https://www.livemomentous.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Dr. Noam Sobel (00:03:46) Sponsors: ROKA, Thesis, Helix Sleep (00:06:46) Olfaction Circuits (Smell) (00:14:49) Loss & Regeneration of Smell, Illness (00:21:39) Brain Processing of Smell (00:24:40) Smell & Memories (00:27:52) Sponsor: AG1 (Athletic Greens) (00:29:07) Humans & Odor Tracking (00:39:25) The Alternating Nasal Cycle & Autonomic Nervous System (00:48:18) Cognitive Processing & Breathing (00:54:47) Neurodegenerative Diseases & Olfaction (01:00:12) Congenital Anosmia (01:05:01) Sponsor: InsideTracker (01:06:19) Handshaking, Sharing Chemicals & Social Sensing (01:15:07) Smelling Ourselves & Smelling Others (01:22:02) Odors & Romantic Attraction (01:24:58) Vomeronasal Organ, “Bruce Effect” & Miscarriage (01:40:20) Social Chemo-Signals, Fear (01:50:26) Chemo-Signaling, Aggression & Offspring (02:03:57) Menstrual Cycle Synchronization (02:12:11) Sweat, Tears, Emotions & Testosterone (02:27:46) Science Politics (02:37:54) Food Odors & Nutritional Value (02:45:34) Human Perception & Odorant Similarity (02:52:12) Digitizing Smell, COVID-19 & Smell (03:05:50) Medical Diagnostic Future & Olfaction Digitization (03:10:55) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Momentous, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac Disclaimer

Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 15-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, from Sunday through Thursday. Knesset correspondent Carrie Keller Lynn and health reporter Renee Ghert-Zand join host Amanda Borschel-Dan on today's episode. Today, the capital is preparing for a “March of the Million,” in which supporters of the coalition and the judicial overhaul are being pushed to show up in great numbers andorganizers are hoping for upwards of 250,000 demonstrators. Who is doing the pushing? On Monday night, the beginning of Israel Memorial Day observance, Keller-Lynn attended the annual joint ceremony in Tel Aviv in which Israelis and West Bank Palestinians mutually commemorate those lost on both sides of the conflict. What did she see there? At the opening of the Independence Day ceremony on Tuesday night, one of the 12 torches was lit by an unusual pair of doctors. Shock trauma pioneer Prof. Avi Rivkind of Hadassah and infection control expert Dr. Khetam Hussein of Rambam. We hear about their dedicated work. Internationally renowned Weizmann Institute of Science professor of neuroimmunology Michal Schwartz received the Israel Prize for science yesterday afternoon, only the fourth woman to do so. We learn about Schwartz's scientific breakthrough. Also at the Israel Prize ceremony, there were two ripples of protest -- in a speach from Amnon Shashua, the president and CEO of Mobileye, and from Michal Rovner, who won the prize for her work in plastic art. Rovner was filmed handing Netanyahu a personal note on stage as she received her award. What was the content of their protests? Keller-Lynn reminds us that the Knesset opens again next week and shares her thoughts on what can we expect. Discussed articles include: Israeli teen girls win first, second place in annual Bible quiz Religious, settler groups lead charge on Thursday's pro-overhaul ‘Million March' 15,000 attend controversial joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day event Doctors tapped for Independence Day torchlighting hope to heal fractured nation For scientist Michal Schwartz, Israel Prize is rewarding milestone in ongoing journey Meeting PM at Israel Prize event, two recipients warn of danger to society Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on iTunes, Spotify, PlayerFM, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out yesterday's Daily Briefing episode: https://omny.fm/shows/the-daily-briefing/what-would-israels-founding-parents-think-about-it IMAGE: The 75th anniversary Independence Day ceremony, held at Mount Herzl, Jerusalem on April 25, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Science writer Philip Ball has followed the relationship between government and its scientific advisors throughout the pandemic. He discusses the role of scientific advisors in the light of conflicting information following the leak of a number of former Health Minister Matt Hancock's WhatsApp messages. Phil tells us why he believes greater transpearency is needed around the advice offered to government. The head of the US FBI has suggested the Covid 19 pandemic may have been started through a leak from a laboratory. No evidence has been offered. The ‘lab leak ‘ theory is the counter idea to Covid having a natural origin. We hear from three scientists who have been to China to investigate different aspects of the virus origins story. Journalist and microbiologist Jane Qui visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology – the lab at the centre of the lab leak theory. Marion Koopmans from Erasmus University in Rotterdam was a member of the WHO mission to China to investigate the origins of Covid 19. And Eddie Holmes from the University of Sydney visited the market in Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak. Besides inflating party balloons helium gas has a vast range of industrial uses, particularly as a coolant. There's a world shortage, and helium is only extracted with fossil fuels such as coal and methane gas. Earth scientist Anran Cheng at the University of Oxford has developed a method to look for helium deposits without the fossil fuel connection. And ever wondered how heavy all the animals in the world might be ? We have the answer thanks to Ron Milo and Lior Greenspoon from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. BBC Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University. Presenter: Victoria Gill Producer: Julian Siddle

What are network motifs, and how and why do they matter to biological networks? On this episode, we talk with Uri Alon, systems biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, about biological networks. In the early 2000s, Uri discovered some of the fundamental characteristics of these networks and, since then, has worked to understand networks across different levels of biological organization. His work shows that, from genes to whole organisms, networks are filled with repeating patterns of connections known as network motifs, such as feedback and feedforward loops. We talk about how the motifs arise and what they mean for the performance and evolution of the systems in which they're embedded. Moving farther afield, we also talk about how scientists can productively move into new areas, and how Uri teaches early-stage scientists to leap confidently into the unknown. And a bonus: Uri sings and plays guitar for us! Cover art: Keating Shahmehri

Recently, an impressive development in embryology was reported by the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science. Using only stem cells, without the presence of sperm, eggs, or even a womb, researchers successfully created functioning mouse embryos, complete with beating hearts, blood circulation, brain tissue and rudimentary digestive systems. Carolyn Johnson in The Washington Post described the discovery as “a fascinating, potentially fraught realm of science that could one day be used to create replacement organs for humans.”  For the more than 100,000 people currently waiting for a life-saving organ donation, that kind of breakthrough would indeed seem like a miracle. However, since scientists are still years away from creating human organs in a lab for the purpose of transplant, the technology raises serious ethical questions, none of which should be taken lightly.   One of these questions is, in fact, an old one. Do the promises of embryonic stem cell research justify it? While some stem cells can be harvested from a variety of non-embryonic sources such as bone marrow, others are harvested from so-called “unused” embryos that have been donated to science. The lives of these tiny, undeveloped human beings are taken in the process.  For context, the research conducted by the Weizmann Institute uses embryonic stem cells. Though, for the time being, this implies only embryonic stem cells harvested from mice, the move to human research would involve the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos and involve tissue derived from already living human beings.  The Christian stance on when life begins is the same as the science. Human life begins at conception, and every single human life is worthy of protection. If we would not take the life of a born child in our research for a cure for some medical condition, neither the anonymity of an embryo nor the confines of a laboratory justify doing the same thing in the process of embryonic stem cell research.   Science is a process of trial and error, but we should never employ “trial and error” with the lives of thousands of human beings, in particular human beings who cannot consent to our actions. A rule of thumb is this. If you wouldn't try an experiment on an adult or small child, don't do it to human embryos at any stage.   The breakthrough at the Weizmann Institute, however, takes this old debate a step further. On one hand, lead researcher Dr. Jacob Hanna was quick to clarify that the goal is not to make complete, living organisms of mice or any other species. “We are really facing difficulties making organs,” he said, “and in order to make stem cells become organs, we need to learn how the embryo does that.”  Given the history of science, including the last chapter involving breathless promises of what embryonic stem cell research would bring, the grandiose predictions of scientists should be taken with at least a grain of salt. The process of growing organs for mice, for example, involved the creation of entire embryos. Should the technology be perfected in mice, what ethical or legal limits are there to prevent the creation of synthetic human embryos for the purpose of harvesting their organs?  Our first concern should be what these embryos would be created for. The answer is, inevitably, “science,” devoid of any consideration for human purpose, relationships, worth, or dignity as equal members of the human species. All societies that treat people as a means of scientific advancement, instead of infinitely valuable ends in-and-of themselves, have a track record of perpetrating atrocities.   A second concern is what these embryos would be deprived of. Though not all do, every human should enter the world with the love and commitment of their biological mom and dad. The very design of human development suggests this, and societies have long recognized that those born without these relationships have had something priceless taken from them. Creating children from cloning or stem cells intentionally makes them orphans, ripping them from the vital context of parental relationship. It is a grave injustice.  Bringing children into the world as a product of pure science without the possibility of relationship with their biological parents or relatives is enough an ethical consideration to oppose such research, but we should also consider the implications of recklessly creating humans for future experimentation and of dismantling them to see how their components work.   Science is, in many ways, blind to what should be ethical bright lines. Creating organs for transplant in order to save lives is a worthy goal. But such work should only proceed in an ethical manner, one which does not require the death of other distinct, valuable, human beings. Unfortunately, such ideas have not shaped the society we live in today.