The Ben-Gurion University shootings in the southern Negev city of Be’er Sheva: A tribute to Sergey Gredeskul and his wife Viktoria
An international conference on dentistry was postponed. An international research conference for medical students, which was supposed to begin on 8 October, has been completely cancelled,” he adds.
Universities in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank work extensively with institutions overseas, but there is little in the way of cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian institutions.
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’s essential for the security of the Middle East and a better world, that we do this.
Thirty-four students and relatives of faculty at Bar-Ilan University were killed in various communities in the south, as well as around 260 people, in the Supernova music festival that was attacked by Hamas. The relatives of faculty members and students are among the people kidnapped by Hamas. The dead also include army reservists who tried to protect people from the attackers.
Health infrastructure, scientists, and researchers 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.
84 people, including students, faculty members and their relatives, lost their lives at Ben-Gurion University, which is in the Negev in the southern city of Be’er Sheva. There were at least five kidnapped and nine injured, according to the university. The dead include entire families annihilated in one day.
Sergey Gredeskul and his wife Viktoria were killed in Ofakim, 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.
Gredeskul’s grandson, who lives in Europe, contacted us on the day that we were contacted. He said that his grandparents do not answer the phone. So, we started to call them as well. After several failed attempts, I reported a missing person to the police.
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 in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv, has also lost faculty members. One, Marcel Frailich Kaplun of the Department of Science Teaching, was murdered at Kibbutz Be’eri, the communal settlement where she lived. Her husband, Dror Kaplun, is still missing.
Frailich Kaplun was a researcher in the practice of improving science teaching, especially chemistry. She was a smart, devoted, kind person who would always make others happy. She was “passionate about demonstrating chemistry’s relevance to industry and to our day-to-day lives,” Kesner wrote.
The Israel-Hamas Conflict: Damage to Traditional Universities in the Gaza Strip by Attacks of the International University of Gaza (IUG)
Arie Zaban, president of Bar-Ilan University, says the campus is empty, because the start of the academic year has been postponed and many PhD students and younger researchers have been drafted into the military. The helpline is open for emotional support. The department of optometry has activated its Mobile Vision Clinic, which is travelling around to treat people evacuated from kibbutzim and cities in the south such as Ofakim and Netivot. Many of the people lost their glasses when they were evacuated. The eye tests are preformed by the Optometrists, and they prepare special glasses for them.
15% of Tel Aviv University’s student population is made up of Arab-Israeli students. The vice president of the University made it a priority to make the students feel safe. “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. Al-Quds Open University is a distance learning university. All seven universities have campuses in areas that Israel’s military has ordered people to evacuate.
According to data from the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, based in Ramallah, buildings in five of the traditional universities have been moderately or severely damaged, including Al-Azhar University — Gaza, Gaza University and the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), all in Gaza City (see ‘Israel–Hamas conflict’). UNOSAT found damage to buildings at five universities. An imagery analyst from UNOSAT told Nature that the agency uses “visual change detection analysis”, a method of comparing satellite images collected before and after an event to locate and assess damaged buildings.
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. None of the IUG’s 17,000 students or more than 300 faculty members were on site at the time of the destruction. According to Amani Al Mqadma, many have been killed or injured in other bombings.
Nature asked the IDF whether it could provide evidence that the university was involved in unlawful activity. The IDF is focused on eliminating threats from Hamas, according to the statement sent by e-mail. Questions of your kind will be looked into in a later stage.”
AQOU’s Gaza branch has also reported damage from bombings. Mohammad Abu Jazar, an environmental engineer at the university, says he has lost all hope that the international community will come to their aid. “I apologize for my boldness, [but I] don’t believe there is a scientific community, or global scientific community, that can do anything.”
74 people have been hosted by Hatem Ali Elaydi at 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. Families are drinking salty water from the sea because of the lack of electricity, internet, and fuel. He says they start their day by checking on each other to see who they have lost in the previous night’s bombing.
The Israel-Hamas conflict: voices from scientists on the front lines: the case of the West Bank, according to a researcher interviewed by Nature
Parts of local government in the West Bank, which is home to almost three million Palestinians, are run by the Palestinian National Authority. However, Israel retains responsibility for borders and security, and its citizens have been settling in the area in growing numbers.
More violence has caused the teaching and research at the West Bank’s 34 higher-education institutions to stop in person, according to researchers who spoke to Nature.
Majdi Owda, a data scientist at the Arab American University in Ramallah, says students and faculty members are now at increased risk of being shot if they travel to campuses. Palestinian motor vehicles can be identified by their number plates. “At the moment, we cannot allow anyone to travel in such an environment,” he says.
“Safety comes first,” adds Raed Debiy, a spokesperson for An-Najah National University in Nablus in the West Bank. 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
Israeli authorities arrested Imad Barghouthi in connection with his work with the 2030 Egyptian atomic energy accord – an important tool for strengthening relations between Israel and Morocco
Palestinian academics and students have also been arrested. 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. At the end of June this year, 1,117 Palestinians were in detention under this system, according to the human-rights watchdog B’Tselem in Jerusalem. More recent data are not yet available.
On 1 November, astrophysicist Imad Barghouthi of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem was sentenced to prison for six months after police broke into his home at 3 a.m. on 23 October, handcuffed him and took him away, according to his daughter Duha.
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 have relevance outside of the United States. He has no political affiliation and has never carried out violent actions,” says Martone.
Nature contacted the IDF regarding the arrest of Barghouthi. It referred us to the Israel Security Agency Shin Bet and the police. Neither had responded by the time this article was published.
Hicham El Habti, president of Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) in Salé, Morocco, was among the first to reach out to Daniel Chamovitz, president of BGU, to express sadness and solidarity after the 7 October attacks. For two years, the universities have been cooperating on projects relating to sustainability and climate change under the 2020 Abraham Accords, in which Israel and some of the neighbouring Arab countries began normalizing relations. The delegations of students and faculty members have traveled between BGU and UM6P to initiate research programmes on a wide range of topics.
Arie-Zakanic is the president of Bar-Ilan University and chair of the Association of University Heads in Israel. It’s important that we make this a better place, in the memory of those who have died, so that we can overcome this.
There is a bilateral cooperation agreement between Bar-Ilan and the Moroccan National Energy Transition Consortium. These collaborations are expected to continue. “Those projects are typically at the level of person-to-person, and 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,” he says.
At the same time, most international students and researchers who were working at the Weizmann Institute have returned, or are returning, to their home countries, says Weizmann Earth scientist Eyal Rotenberg. International scientific collaboration is being severely affected.
It’s a similar story in the West Bank. Debiy of An-Najah University says that joint projects, including conferences with colleagues from Europe and the United States, are being cancelled or postponed. International academics can no longer come to the West Bank, he says. “It’s not even safe to access the bridge between Jordan and Palestine anymore.”
Why monkey laundering undermines research: How scientific and economic forces affect the future of food crops and crop-growing technologies and how early warning systems need to change
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. “We know [through] doing experiments that healthy, happy animals result in the most consistent data,” says microbiologist Ricardo Carrion.
The oldest evidence of birds in the southern hemisphere is left by ancient birds 128 million years ago, in the rocks of Australia. The tracks would have been made when Australia was part of the Gondwanasupercontinent and close to the South Pole. 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 we frame the future of food needs to change,according to Fischer and Rock.
Natural hazard can be stopped from becoming disasters by early-warning systems. The UN’s early warming program is doomed to fail unless it is supported and implemented outside the UN, warn Andrew Tupper and Carina Fearnley. The places that need systems the most are the ones that have the least effective UN approach. 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. Everyone should get involved in the thinking that we need to have.
Source: Daily briefing: How ‘monkey laundering’ undermines research
Making Oxygen on Mars by Separating a Robot Chemical Catalyst from Martian Meteorites and Using Earth’s Surface Materials
A robot chemist can make oxygen on Mars, using only materials found on the planet’s surface. The machine found an effective oxygen-generating catalyst among three million compounds when it separated and analysed Martian meteorites.