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MA student Maya Kremien, along with Professor Amatzia Genin from the Hebrew University and Professor Uri Shavit of the Technion, conducted research on this interesting coral species, common to the Eilat environment, due to its unique movements. Pulsating movements are known in other marine species like jellyfish, which do so for reasons of predation and feeding.

Yet corals are not known to engage in predation, so Kremien observed the coral continuously to understand the environmental or chemical reasons behind its movements, and her and her team made some riveting discoveries.

Using an underwater measuring device called PIV (Particle Imaging Velocimetry) that measures the flow of water around the coral accurately with lasers by capturing images and data computation, Kremien and her team were able to observe the corals’ environment at the resolution of a particle.

A 200-year-old mystery solved

Their experiment revealed that one of the reasons for coral pulsation was to mix the water around them to get the nutrients they need, and then to sweep the used water away. These essential nutrients include carbon-dioxide in the daytime, oxygen at night and phosphate and nitrogen at all hours.

The team discovered yet another reason for the corals’ unique motion that did not have to do with simply cleaning its environment. With the same machine in a controlled lab environment, the team discovered that the coral engages in a pulsating motion to maintain its photosynthesis rates by sweeping away extra oxygen. The presence of photosynthetic algae in the coral tissue is what has allowed coral species to remain one of the most ancient species, and the pulsating movements in the Heteroxenia coral help perpetuate this corals’ long existence.

Therefore, the team reached the conclusion that the pulsating movement of the coral maintains an essential chemical balance and helps it “breathe” through photorespiration.

The results of the study solve the nearly 200-year-old question (beginning with the research of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) of why the Heteroxenia coral pulsates, but also may have important applications to the fields of engineering and medicine in the future.

Photo by Derek Keats

Mazor Robotics, an Israeli company with subsidiaries in Florida (USA) and Münster (Germany), last year launched robot-guided surgery. And not just any surgery: their system, Renaissance, takes on the particularly delicate field of spine-surgery.

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To this day, it’s been used for tens of thousands of implants worldwide, has launched Mazor Robotics into NASDAQ and has proved an overall success. NoCamels visited their offices in Caesarea to learn if all surgery before Renaissance will now look Medieval.

Renaissance: A surgeon-dependent robot

Inside Mazor’s premises, I’m received by CEO, Ori Hadomi, along with International Service Group Manager, Amir Suidan. I’m introduced to the robot, its history and functioning.

CEO Ori Hadomi

The brand Renaissance harbors both hardware (the robot itself) and software (the program on which the operation is planned). How does Renaissance add precision to surgical interventions? By pre-programming the operation on a virtual image of the patient’s spine.

The surgeon pinpoints on the virtual spine (a replica of the patient’s) the exact point on which they want to intervene and with which tools. This information is transmitted to the robot, nestled on the patient’s back. After receiving the pre-planning, the little bot will automatically readjust its position to the one needed by the surgeon to carry out the operation.

Renaissance is not a cane come to yank the surgeon off stage. While designing it, Mazor were careful to not “over-robotize it.” They are aware of the importance of keeping the planning and performance of the operation in the surgeon’s hands.  “It’s very sexy to say that in the future robots will replace surgeons,” Hadomi admits “I don’t only think that it won’t happen, I don’t even recommend it [should] happen.”

The operation, stage I: Pre-planning

Amir Suidan travels all over the globe to teach hospitals how to use Renaissance. Likewise, Suidan offered NoCamels a demonstration.

Our mock-operation was to be carried out on a clay model. “The patient,” Suidan contextualizes, “has a very common diagnostic: spondylolisthesis.” I believe him. “One vertebra is more protruding than the one below. This provokes back and leg pain.”

In spine surgery, an implant is inserted to stabilize two vertebrae. The challenge is introducing the screw into a very thin bone corridor. Surgeons run the risk of hitting the spinal cord or the nerve canals. Both areas have significant clinical impact. CEO Hadomi explains that before Renaissance, some 10 percent of the cases ended with misplaced implants and about 5 percent, with long-term neurological damage.

A Renaissance-based operation begins with a CT scan of the patient’s spine. This creates the 3D representation of the spine on the computer screen upon which the surgeon will pinpoint through three different angles the exact niche into which he wants to insert the implant.

The surgeon then indicates which screw he wants to implant into the spine. “Taking into account all the data, the software proposes a solution, a guide for how to mount the robot,” Suidan explains, “Our system’s compliant with any type of implant company.”

The operation, stage II: Performance

International Service Group Manager Amir Suidan

The robot is placed on a bone-mounted platform on the patients back. Now comes its moment of glory: the robot, whizzing, humming and whirring, almost imperceptibly moves into the position it needs for the surgeon to carry out the operation.

“The virtual spine isn’t a static model,” Suidan points out “the patient will have rearranged his spine slightly from the time the CT scan was done until he’s on the bed.” Throughout the operation, two similar images glow side by side on the screen:  the preoperative CT and a live X-ray image taken from the OR. The aim of the operation is to match both images.

Suidan defines the robots actions as “executing the preoperative plan.” He is very enthusiastic: “We’ve made the planning! We know what implants we’re using! You can make sure you have all the pieces before you start the operation! No more: ‘Oh! We don’t have one of these! Give me whatever you have…!”

Coming soon: the brain

In July 2012, Mazor Robotics received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) marketing clearance for creating a Renaissance brain surgery robot. Hadomi explains they plan on launching it this year.

“The brain is not very different from the spine,” Suidan explains to NoCamels.”With the spine, we want to enter the bone, remain on the bone and not touch any nerves. It’s the same with the brain. If there’s a cancerous cell inside the brain, the surgeon chooses which part of the cranium to go through to target the tumor.”

I’m also given a demonstration. This time the patient is a grinning clay cranium. The operation is also pre-operatively rehearsed on a 3D scan. The biggest difference with a spine intervention, as the mocking skull on the operation table points out, is that a cranium is round. The trajectory can enter through many points, unlike spine which is a straight line. Still, it’s the surgeon who designs the operation.

Hadomi adds that at Mazor they are also currently working on more applications and technologies. “We are focusing on spine,” he remarks, “we want to bring more robotic technologies to expand the type of solutions we can offer in spine.”

“We’ve saved 200-400 lives”

President Peres Visiting The Mazor Robotics Factory (Photo by Assaf Shilo)

Hadomi, after studying at the Technion, joined the company in 2003 through his acquaintance with the founder, Professor Moshe Shoham. “This company was founded to develop robotic solutions for pathology (hip, knee, spine…) and traumatology. But we couldn’t afford to be so diverse and focused on the area which maximized our valuable position.”

Mazor Robotics started off as a small startup. Although nurtured on seed investors and venture capital, they soon became publicly traded in NASDAQ. At NoCamels, we’ve followed the evolution of Renaissance since the announcement of its completion in June 2012.

Hadomi is proud of his company’s creation: “Renaissance has been used in 4,000 operations and zero cases have long term nerve damage. Compared to that 5 percent of the statistics, there are probably some 200 to 400 patients whose lives we saved.”

As of winter 2012, Mazor had sold 42 systems around the world, 21 of which in the US. The system costs about $1 million per unit, a significant investment for the hospital. Its target markets: the really complex spine procedures and the minimally invasive spine procedures. Renaissance can also help improve scoliosis, a very common spine deviation in teenagers.

Invasive spine procedures can entail long recovery time and risk of infection. Renaissance doesn’t only decrease all this, it also reduces hospitalization time. This is in hospital’s best interests because less hospitalization time means more available beds for other patients.

Israeli President Shimon Peres visited Mazor Robotic’s offices just a few weeks before NoCamels. Mazor decided to surprise him: They asked surgeons worldwide to prepare a short video on their smartphones talking about their experience with Renaissance.

A happy company

Ori Hadomi, in an interview to The New York Times, spoke about the importance of an open, happy and communicative workspace. “I believe my role is not to make people work but to give them the right working conditions so that they will enjoy what they do.”

I leave Mazor Robotics and, for the sake of contrast, decide to take a walk round Caesarea’s archeological site. Strangely aware of my own scoliosis, I imagine the Byzantine boats which in centuries past had glided into the stone harbor like Renaissance navigates into the spine and somehow it all seems more in the past than ever.

Photos: Courtesy

Israeli startup Glide, founded it in 2012, is now trying to take communications further by proposing an alternative to texting through “video walkie-talkie”.

“We were all bothered by how difficult it was to communicate with friends and family through video,” say Glide founders Ari Roisman, Adam Korbl and Jonathan Caras. “Video calls are hard to arrange because all the participants need to align their schedules, [while] texting is so convenient.” Roisman says the founders then thought: “what if we could make video chat just as simple and easy as texting?” Then Glide was born.

According to the founders, Glide’s service experience is just as convenient as texting. It offers asynchronous realtime video chat, meaning one doesn’t have to think about whether or not the person on the other end is busy. The user pushes the button and streams their video to a contact, which can stream back right away, or if busy, answer later.

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Roisman, Glide’s CEO claims other applications Tango and Whatsapp or services like Skype and FaceTime are “different from Glide because they have introduced video messaging as an afterthought. Yet, video messaging in this way is really slow, and doesn’t allow for real time communication,” he explains.

Referring to Facetime or Skype, Roisman says that when users video-calls someone and they’re unavailable, the conversation is over before it starts. “The video content is lost and the call was a failure,” says Roisman. “With Glide’s real-time video chat, the user doesn’t have to fully commit to the session like a phone call,” Roisman adds, “since the videos are simultaneously broadcast live and saved to the cloud. If your friends are available, they can watch the video live, and if not, it’s waiting for them so they can watch it later.”

A different product with $2 million in the bank

Roisman explains how video works on other apps: “Videos are first created locally on the smartphone device, they are then compressed and uploaded. The intended recipient then receives a notification that it has received a video message.”

Roisman claims that because Glide is a “video walkie-talkie”, an asynchronous service, “it uses half the bandwidth of Skype or Facetime, therefore works much better for groups, and automatically saves each moment.”

Glide, which employs 17 people, has so far raised $2 million from angel investors. Investors include former ICQ CEO Orey Gilliam, ooVoo founder and former CEO Philippe Schwartz, Australian VC Square Peg, New-York based VC Prolific, among others.

“We are ready for our next round of funding this summer,” says Roisman and adds that currently, Glide’s team is 100 percent focused on creating the best possible video communication experience for its users.

Crowd favorite

Regarding its business plan, Roisman says “eventually, we see tremendous potential in licensing our technology to other developers (IE Platform as a service) and offering power users premium features and functionality.”

Most of Glide’s capital went towards development, “building a powerful piece of technology,” says Roisman. The app was ranked as one of Apple’s favorite new apps and has recently won the “Crowd Favorite” honors on TechCrunch’s Disrupt Competition.

Roisman says in the short term Glide is “focused on expanding to Android and additional login options while we continue to improve the user experience.”

Glide is available for iOS and has a beta version for Android devices.

Photo: Glide

Ms. Negrin, who has coloboma, a birth defect that perforates a structure of the eye and afflicts about 1 in 10,000 people, is an employee at OrCam, an Israeli start-up that has developed a camera-based system intended to give the visually impaired the ability to both “read” easily and move freely.

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Until now reading aids for the visually impaired and the blind have been cumbersome devices that recognize text in restricted environments, or, more recently, have been software applications on smartphones that have limited capabilities.

In contrast, the OrCam device is a small camera worn in the style of Google Glass, connected by a thin cable to a portable computer designed to fit in the wearer’s pocket. The system clips on to the wearer’s glasses with a small magnet and uses a bone-conduction speaker to offer clear speech as it reads aloud the words or object pointed to by the user.

The system is designed to both recognize and speak “text in the wild,” a term used to describe newspaper articles as well as bus numbers, and objects as diverse as landmarks, traffic lights and the faces of friends.

It currently recognizes English-language text and beginning this week will be sold through the company’s Web site for $2,500, about the cost of a midrange hearing aid. It is the only product, so far, of the privately held company, which is part of the high-tech boom in Israel.

The device is quite different from other technology that has been developed to give some vision to people who are blind, like the artificial retina system called Argus II, made by Second Sight Medical Products. That system, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in February, allows visual signals to bypass a damaged retina and be transmitted to the brain.

The OrCam device is also drastically different from Google Glass, which also offers the wearer a camera but is designed for people with normal vision and has limited visual recognition and local computing power.

OrCam was founded several years ago by Amnon Shashua, a well-known researcher who is a computer science professor at Hebrew University here. It is based on computer vision algorithms that he has pioneered with another faculty member, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, and one of his former graduate students, Yonatan Wexler.

“What is remarkable is that the device learns from the user to recognize a new product,” said Tomaso Poggio, a computer scientist at M.I.T. who is a computer vision expert and with whom Dr. Shashua studied as a graduate student. “This is more complex than it appears, and, as an expert, I find it really impressive.”

The advance is the result of both rapidly improving computing processing power that can now be carried comfortably in a wearer’s pocket and the computer vision algorithm developed by the scientists.
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Via The New York Times
Photo by OrCam

About 300 million children worldwide go to school in earthquake-prone areas and might be exposed to danger in case an earthquake strikes. To solve this problem, an Israeli student and his instructor invented an earthquake-proof table, which can withstand great damage.

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The “Earthquake Proof Table”, was a project conceived at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, designed to give a superior level of protection in the event of an earthquake. The project presented such an impressive design, that it was admitted into the permanent collection of the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art).

The board of the museum inducted the “Earthquake Proof Table” into its permanent collection of the department of architecture and design.

Can withstand impact from immensely heave objects

“The Earthquake Proof table” was a joint development of Arthur Brutter, designed as part of his final schoolwork project, and his lecturer Ido Bruno from the department of Industrial Design.

The table is designed to give a superior level of protection in the event of an earthquake. In such a scenario, people taking shelter under the table have a much higher chance of survival, according to the designers.

The table is designed to withstand the impact and weight of immense objects by flexing and absorbing the pressure. The table in its current format is the development of Bezalel Labs Ltd., center for research and development.

It was sent to Italy for a comprehensive assessment of stress thresholds, after which it was further developed for a full process of commercialization. It was sent to Italy for a comprehensive assessment of stress thresholds, after which it was further developed for a full process of commercialization.

Photo: courtesy

The mitral valve acts as the heart’s gatekeeper. It regulates the flow of blood between the two chambers of the left side of the heart. When the valve’s two leaflets fail to close completely, blood regurgitates into the left atrium (hence the condition’s name), decreasing blood flow to the rest of the body. To compensate, the heart pumps harder, an action that may eventually lead to heart failure.

Israeli company MitrAssist is working on an implant which would be placed on top of the native valve and then anchored securely to work in unison with the body’s own valve. “Our ‘valve-in-valve’ approach is designed to prevent leakage and restore normal blood flow,” MitrAssist’s CEO, Gil Naor tells NoCamels. “Our valve works with the body rather than against it.”

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According to the company, there are ways to slow down the course of MR, but there is no way to completely prevent or cure it. Between 600K-900K people each year suffer a leakage severe enough to compromise their quality of life yet not severe enough to undergo surgery, the company says.

It’ll get worse before it gets better

The irony is that the only “solution” these people have is to wait for their situation to deteriorate, at which time they may become candidates for current surgical options: valve repair or replacement. However, the company’s product, dubbed MitraFix, “has minimal impact on the heart’s physiology, treats all types of MR unlike mitral repair, and does not trigger patient deterioration like replacement,” says Naor, who emphasizes that MitraFix is not a replacement, but rather, an enhancement to the body’s natural function.

Since it is longer than the body’s own valve, MitraFix effectively closes the remaining gap between the native valve’s leaflets to restore normal valve functioning. “We give hope to people who right now don’t have much of a chance of undergoing surgery because it’s too dangerous due to their medical condition or age,” says Naor.

Naor is not without a personal agenda. The company’s CEO has recently learned that he himself suffers from MR. With his own health on the line, plus an estimated market of $1.2 billion by 2014, the 20-year biomedical engineering veteran created what he believes to be the “next frontier” in treating structural heart disease.

Shooting for $5 million in financing

However, there’s still a long way to go before people suffering from MR will reap the benefits of MitraFix, as the first clinical study of the device won’t start before 2016.

Of the $600,000 MitrAssist has raised, $500,000 came from The Trendlines Group, with the rest from angel investors, including doctors from around the world. By targeting potential strategic partners and venture capital firms, the Company anticipates closing an additional $5 million Series A financing round by the end of this year.

MitrAssist began as a company focused on mitral valve regurgitation, but Naor is looking ahead. He started to research other valves in the body – and other diseases or conditions — where he can apply this exciting technology.

Photo by MitrAssist

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With $800K raised from TheTime.co.il, the company is actually trying to pioneer a new way of communicating. It’s not trying to migrate PowerPoint and Prezi users to its product. Instead, it wants users who don’t do email for a living, and for whom creating a simple 10-slide deck with PowerPoint or even Prezi is a confusing and frustrating experience.

Built entirely on HTML5 for PC and post-PC device compatibility, Emaze has the potential to become the “PowerPoint of the Everyman.” It’s quite easy to get going with but the young company has more work ahead of it to truly make the product’s usability dead simple.

I do, however, like the approach Emaze takes, unlike Prezi, of limiting users for their own benefit in order to get them quickly from first slide to “wow.”

For example, users can’t choose any color they wish for text, or any transition between slides. This is because these are limited by Emaze to best fit the chosen template. Templates, by the way, are a key feature the founders tout as aimed at delivering a high-quality visual impact. There are currently six templates, including 2D and 3D ones. If you’re set on making me puke, there’s the “Desktop” template, which delivers Prezi’s trademark vertigo effect.

A couple of Emaze presentation examples are here and here.
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Via TechCrunch
Photo by Emaze

Beyond Verbal, a startup based out of Israel, claims that it has developed a way to take computer-based voice recognition one step further, by creating software that is able to detect not just the words, but the emotional nuances of a voice to decipher how a person speaking is feeling. Recently, it announced its first round of funding, $2.8 million led by the newly-launched Genesis Angels, to roll out its patented technology commercially.

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As part of the investment, Kenges Rakishev, investor and co-founder of Genesis Angels, is joining the board.

Beyond Verbal offers its technology as a API-style cloud-based licensed service that can be integrated into bigger projects: the sky’s the limit for what these services might be, but you can imagine emotion detection used in all kinds of scenarios, from customer services to games, dating services (maybe to help people figure out if someone is really interested in them) and, yes, personal assistants like Siri.

Interestingly, while we tend to think of voice recognition as a customer-focused service, one potential application can actually be to help customer services representatives improve their own performance. “We can even tell if an agent is losing his temper. We can tell if you are losing your ‘sales perfect’ intonation,” said CEO Yuval Mor in an interview. Indeed, the premise of Beyond Verbal’s service is that a lot of the voice recognition services on the market today only give part of the story:“It’s not just what people say but how they say it,” he says.

Beyond Verbal also provides analytics and diagnostics that help customers track different emotions picked up through their applications. Beyond Verbal has yet to announce any customers, although the first is likely to come in the next few weeks, according to CEO Yuval Mor.
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Via TechCrunch
Photo by Chris Sgaraglino

The company was founded two years ago by CEO Amir Maor and CTO Yaron Segalov, both who have previous experience in the mobile industry and with big data. As they developed the concept which has become today’s new Appreciate application, earlier prototypes released into the Android marketplace gained tens, and even hundreds of thousands of installs, indicating demand for the service they’ve been building.

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Maor notes that the first version of the app reached over half a million installs, even though it was more prototype than finished release. The private beta launched around a month ago has already gained 10,000 users. While backend of these apps has evolved over the years, the version of Appreciate launched recently would be unrecognizable to any of the company’s previous users.

It’s not just the overall look-and-feel that’s changed, it’s the entire way the new app discovery service has been set up, the way it works, the navigation, the personalized recommendations it delivers, and more.

A unique way of determining app quality

Like many startup founders, Maor cites a personal need as the inspiration for building Appreciate, originally. “As the number of apps grew, we found it harder to find good content for our mobile phones,” he tells TechCrunch. “It started with just finding quality apps, and that improved over time. But then, even though we could find quality apps, it got harder to find those that were more suited to what we were interested in.”

Maor says that though it has become easy enough to find the Android app blockbusters, sifting through a narrower category, like chess games or arcade games (his personal favorite) is difficult.

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Via TechCrunch
Photo by Appreciate

Israeli startup Tawkon, which gained a significant amount of traction with an application designed to measure the amount of radiation emitted from Android phones, is now launching an app intended for the Japanese market.

Tawkon’s app uses real-time information gathered by a smartphone to alert users when radiation levels are high, and also to identify radiation “hotspots”in their immediate area. When talking to NoCamels in 2011, the company said that its aim is to increase awareness of radiation as well as instruct on ways to decrease radiation, such as using an earpiece.

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Now the company is launching its app made solely for the Japanese market, as it believes the Japanese are particularly sensitive to issues related to radiation. Whether it’s the fallout from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, or the damages done to nuclear reactors in Fukushima in 2011, there are areas in Japan that still suffer the consequences of radiation on a daily basis.

“There are phones in Japan that actually measure the radiation around you, similar to a Geiger counter, however they don’t measure their own radiation,” CEO Gil Friedlander told The Next Web. “We see this as an opportunity to provide phone users that are concerned about ‘non-ionizing’ radiation – the kind that emits from your phone – with a means to monitor their exposure and change their habits accordingly.”

Aside from the original app in English and the Japanese version, Tawkon is also available in Russian and Hindu.

Photo: Tawkon