How monkey laundering undermines research is the daily briefing
Hamas in Israel: a bridge to peace for the Middle East and the Gazans, says Dr. Amitiel Zaban
There was an international conference on dentistry that was postponed. An international research conference for medical students, which was supposed to begin on 8 October, has been completely cancelled,” he adds.
BGU lost 84 people, including students and faculty members, during the Hamas attacks in Israel. One of them was Sergey Gredeskul. The head of physics at BGU says Sergey was a musician, storyteller, and historian of the Kharkiv school of physics. Five out of the six main universities in Gaza have been bombed or damaged in Israel’s bombardment and ground operation against Hamas. Electrical engineer Hatem Ali Elaydi says that 74 people from seven families are sheltering in his home. The families are drinking salty water from the sea because of the lack of electricity, Internet, and fuel. In the West Bank, in-person teaching and research has stopped because of the risk of being shot on the way to campus. According to United Nations figures, there have been three Israelis and 183 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since 7 October. Many partnerships are on ice. Some academics think that their work will be a bridge to peace. “Those projects are typically at the level of person-to-person,” says Arie Zaban, president of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. “Once it’s at the level of people speaking to people, it’s a very strong relationship and it takes a lot to break it.”
Bill Williamson, a social scientist at Durham University, UK, has been conducting research for a forthcoming study on Palestinian higher education. “I was writing about a system, with all its flaws, that was still working. It is now, at least in Gaza, being destroyed,” he says.
“It is not just a good thing for Palestinians; it is essential for the collective security of the Middle East and, frankly, a better world, that we do this.”
There have been 183 killed by Israel’s security forces in the West Bank as of 15 November, bringing the death toll for the year to over 400. Three Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians, the UN says. On 9 October, Israel’s Firearms Licensing Department launched what it called “an emergency operation to enable as many civilians as possible to arm themselves”.
The health infrastructure, researchers, and science are all affected. In Israel and the West Bank, laboratories are empty and most academic work has stopped or slowed. Many Israeli researchers have been called up as military reservists.
The Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the southern city of Be’er Sheva, is 40 kilometres from Gaza and lost 84 people including students, faculty members and their relatives. There are at least nine people injured and five kidnapped, according to the university. Entire families were killed in a single day.
Among them was theoretical physicist Sergey Gredeskul, originally from Ukraine, and his wife Viktoria, killed in their home in Ofakim, about 20 kilometres west of Be’er Sheva. “Apart from being a great physicist, Sergey was also a musician, a storyteller and a historian of the famed Kharkiv school of physics,” says BGU’s head of physics, Oleg Krichevsky, who was a close friend of the family.
A grandson and a daughter of Gredeskul contacted us on that day. He said that his grandparents do not answer the phone. So, we started to call them as well. I filed a missing person’s report with the police after trying many times.
After Krichevsky learnt that the couple had been killed, he went to their house to collect their belongings at their daughter’s request. He describes seeing bullet holes everywhere.
The Weizmann Institute of Science has lost some faculty members. One of them was killed at the communal settlement where she lived. The husband is still missing.
Frailich Kaplun was a researcher in the practice of improving science teaching, especially chemistry. Her colleague, Miri Kesner, wrote about her in a tribute published by the Weizmann Institute. She was “passionate about demonstrating chemistry’s relevance to industry and to our day-to-day lives,” Kesner wrote.
Zero tolerance policy toward incitement, hate speech, and buildings destruction at the Bar-Ilan University: a case study in Gaza City
Arie Zaban, President of Bar-Ilan University, says the campus is empty due to the delay in starting the academic year and many PhD students and younger researchers being drafted into the military. The university has opened a helpline for emotional support. A mobile vision clinic has been activated by the department of optometry, which travels around to help people who’ve been evacuated from kibbutzim and cities in the south. “Many of the people, when they were evacuated, they lost their glasses, so Special glasses for people are prepared for them by the optometrists after they get the eye tests.
15% of the student population are Arab-Israelis, and Tel Aviv University is supporting them. “We have made it a priority to ensure these students feel safe coming to the University,” vice-president Millet Shamir said in a statement on the university’s website. “We instated a zero-tolerance policy toward incitement and hate speech on our campus, regardless of whether these are directed at Jews or Arabs.”
Gaza has 17 higher-education institutions, of which 6 are traditional universities, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, based in Ramallah in the West Bank. A seventh, Al-Quds Open University (AQOU), provides distance-learning education. All seven universities are in areas where Israel’s military has ordered people to leave.
In Gaza City alone, there are five traditional universities with buildings that have been damaged or moderately damaged, including Al-Azhar University, Gaza University and the Islamic University of Gaza. UNOSAT has found damage to buildings at five universities. UNOSAT uses a visual change detection analysis that compares satellite images before and after an event to locate damaged buildings, according to an imagery analyst from the agency.
Nine out of the 14 buildings at the IUG, the oldest degree-awarding institution in the territory, were destroyed in two waves of bombing on 9 and 11 October, including science labs, information-technology buildings and medical-education buildings. The IUG has more than 300 faculty members, but none of them were at the time of the destruction. Amani Al Mqadma, the university’s head of international relations says that many have been killed or injured in other bombings.
Nature inquired about whether the university was involved in illegal activity. An IDF spokesperson replied in a statement sent by e-mail: “The IDF is currently focused on eliminating the [threat] from the terrorist organization Hamas. The questions of your kind will be looked into later.
Damage from bombs was reported by the Gaza branch of AQOU. The environmental engineer at the university lost his hope that the international community would come to his aid. “I apologize for my boldness, [but I] don’t believe there is a scientific community, or global scientific community, that can do anything.”
Hatem Ali Elaydi, an electrical engineer at the IUG, says he is hosting 74 people from 7 families in his home. He says a daily priority is to look for food, clean water, medicine, cleaning supplies and clothes for families who have lost their homes. “There is no electricity, no Internet, no drinking water, no fuel” and the families are drinking salty water from the sea. They have to start their day by checking on each other to make sure they are okay after the bombing.
The Israel-Hamas Conflict: Voices from Scientists on the Front Lines: Sources: The Palestine National Authority and An-Najah National University
The Palestine National Authority runs the local government in the West Bank, home to almost three million Palestinians. Israel retains responsibility for borders and security, as its people have been moving in growing numbers.
Researchers spoke to Nature, and stated that the increased violence has stopped in-person teaching and research at the West Bank’s 34 higher education institutions.
Majdi Owda is a data scientist at the Arab American University in Ramallah, and he stated that students are at an increased risk of being shot if they travel to campuses. Palestinian cars can be identified by their number plates. “At the moment, we cannot allow anyone to travel in such an environment,” he says.
Raed Debiy is a spokeswoman for the An-Najah National University in Nablus. Debiy says the university is sending medical students who have completed their clinical training to hospitals across the West Bank to help people who have been injured.
Source: The Israel–Hamas conflict: voices from scientists on the front lines
The Israeli Security Agency Shin Bet and the Police stepped up after Imad Barghouthi, an astronomer at Al-Quds University
Arrests of Palestinian academics and students have been stepped up. For many years, Israel’s authorities have used administrative detention orders — a legal procedure that allows the military to arrest and imprison people considered a security risk, without needing to explain the charges against them. B’Tselem said 1,117 Palestinians were in jails under the system at the end of June. Some recent data isn’t yet available.
On November 1, Imad Barghouthi, an astronomer at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem was sentenced to prison for six months after police broke into his home at 3 a.m. on October 23.
Mario Martone, a theoretical physicist at King’s College London and a member of Scientists for Palestine, which promotes research in the Palestinian territories, is campaigning for Barghouti’s release. He says Barghouthi is influential in his field. “His early works on the dynamics of plasma in the cosmological context have had international relevance. Martone says he has no political affiliation and never carried out violent actions.
Nature contacted the IDF to find out more about Barghouthi’s arrest. It referred us to the Israel Security Agency Shin Bet and the police. Both of them had not replied by the time this article was published.
Source: The Israel–Hamas conflict: voices from scientists on the front lines
What will we learn from Bar-Ilan University? The impact on the international collaboration in the West Bank, according to Eyal Rotenberg
Chamovitz wants such collaborations to continue and even expand. He told Nature that the relationship between BGU and UM6P was warm. Chamovitz says there is a synagogue on campus for Jewish students.
The current situation “is really sad, really traumatic”, says Arie Zaban, president of Bar-Ilan University and chair of the Association of University Heads in Israel. At the same time, I know we’ll overcome this, and we’ll make this a better place, in the name of the people who lost their lives.
Bar-Ilan has a bilateral cooperation agreement with the National Energy Transition Consortium. These collaborations are likely to continue according to Zaban. The level of person-to-person relationships are typically the ones at which those projects are at their highest, and they take a lot to break.
Most international students and researchers who are at the Weizmann Institute have returned to their home countries, says Eyal Rotenberg, Weizmann Earth scientist. Scientific collaboration is being seriously affected.
It’s the same in the West Bank. Conferences with colleagues from Europe and the United States are being cancelled or delayed according to an An-NAjah University researcher. He says international academics can no longer come to the West Bank. “It’s not even safe to access the bridge between Jordan and Palestine anymore.”
Monkey laundering undermines research: the ancient birds of the South Pole as the oldest evidence of a transitional animal on the Australian South Coast
Laboratory monkeys are being illegally poached from the wild, falsely labelled as captive-bred and sold as research animals — a practice known as monkey laundering. Smugglers are being drawn by skyrocketing prices after the biggest supplier, China, halted exports to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Monkey laundering could invalidate study results because wild monkeys have been exposed to a cocktail of diseases, and forcing them into captivity is stressful for them. The researcher says that healthy, happy animals result in the most consistent data.
Footprints preserved in the rocks of Australia’s south coast might have been left by ancient birds 128 million years ago — the earliest evidence for birds in the southern hemisphere. The land where the 27 tracks were made was close to the South Pole when Australia was in the Gondwana supercontinent. Features such as widely spread toes and a distinctive perching claw suggest the animals were birds, not dinosaurs. “It would open its mouth, and you would see teeth,” says palaeontologist Anthony Martin. There is no tail feathers on it. You would see it’s a transitional animal from its dinosaur ancestors.”
The scientific narrative around new food technologies, such as genetically modified crops, often fails to take into account how political and economic forces shape agriculture, note agricultural-development researcher Klara Fischer and anthropologist Joeva Sean Rock. And initial hopes that advances will ease the challenges of subsistence farmers and smallholders often fall by the wayside in favour of private profits. The way in which we view the future of food should be changed.
Natural hazards can be stopped by early-warning systems. Andrew Tupper and Carina Fearnley warned of the danger of the UN program failing unless it is supported and implemented from outside the UN. The places that need such systems the most are the ones where the UN approach is least effective. And terminology can hinder understanding: a category 4 severe tropical cyclone in Samoa would, in neighbouring American Samoa, be described as a category 3 hurricane. We need more joined-up thinking, and everyone — from local governments to individuals — should get involved, the authors write.
Source: Daily briefing: How ‘monkey laundering’ undermines research
A robotic chemist can make oxygen from water using only Martian meteorites – a catalyst for the synthesis and conversion of oxygen on Mars
A robotic chemist powered by artificial intelligence can make oxygen from water using only materials found on Mars’s surface. The refrigerator-sized machine separated and analysed ore from Martian meteorites, and then found an effective oxygen-generating catalyst among the more than three million possible compounds — all without human intervention.
