It was a German philosopher who famously said, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Time and time again, great scientific minds see this process in action, as Israeli scientist Daniel Schectman lived it first hand over the last three decades. In April 1982, Professor Schectman made a dramatic discovery, one which has now rewritten chemistry textbooks and finally earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

But his road to acceptance, let alone recognition, was not easy. In 1982, Schectman looked under his electron microscope and saw that the crystal he had formed stood in direct violation with the accepted laws of nature. Until recently, it was believed that every crystal contains a unique pattern of the arrangement of atoms, a pattern that repeats itself perfectly and consistently. Almost any solid material, from ice to gold, is made up of ordered crystals. What the Israeli professor found that spring day is a pattern that was once thought impossible, proving that atoms could be packed into a pattern which did not repeat itself. The crystals were named by subsequent researchers as “quasicrystals,” but that didn’t stop Professor Schectman from being ridiculed as a “qausi-scientist.” One of his coworkers even presented him with a basic-level textbook on crystallography, suggesting he read it.

“His discovery was extremely controversial. In the course of defending his findings, he was asked to leave his research group,” said the Nobel Committee for Chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the award earlier Wednesday morning.

“However, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter,” it added in a statement. “Scientists are currently experimenting with using quasicrystals in different products such as frying pans and diesel engines.”

In a poetic note, understanding the Israeli scientist’s research was aided by analysis of Islamic architecture, specifically the arabesque style. The beautiful mosaics which dominated the Middle Ages across the Near-East are of the same mathematically regular but infinitely varied patterns as the quasicrystal.

Ten years after Professor Schectman’s findings, the International Union of Crystallography changed their definition of what a crystal actually is, removing the idea that the atoms must be packed in a “regularly ordered, repeating three-dimensional pattern.”

Today, quasicrystals are not only accepted as truth, but are seen as miracle compounds, having been used in, among others, ultra-strong thin needles used for delicate eye surgery.

“The main lesson that I have learned over time is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks,” said Shechtman at a news conference Wednesday at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.

In addition to the Technion, Schectman is also a a professor at Iowa State University in Ames, Iwoa.

The Nobel Prize, perhaps the most prestigious award anyone could ever receive, has now been awarded 10 times to Israelis, a source of tremendous pride for such a small nation. The prize (10 million kronor, or $1.5 million USD)

Said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “I would like to congratulate you, on behalf of the citizens of Israel, for your award, which expresses the intellect of our people. Every Israeli is happy today and every Jew in the world is proud. I also congratulated your institution, the Technion, on the centenary of its founding.”

Last year, we reported that Google was partnering up with the Israel Antiquities Authority to make a digital collection of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. Today, that historic partnership has culminated in the launch of the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls. In addition to being the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible, the scrolls, which date back to the Second Temple Period, give us an amazing insight of what life was like in ancient Israel.

Five complete scrolls have been put online so far, all with interactive high-resolution images, as well as short explanatory videos and background information on the texts and their history.

“The Dead Sea Scrolls Project with the Israel Museum enriches and preserves an important part of world heritage by making it accessible to all on the internet,” said Professor Yossi Matias, Managing Director of Google’s R&D Center in Israel. “Having been involved in similar projects in the past, including the Google Art Project, Yad Vashem Holocaust Collection, and the Prado Museum in Madrid, we have seen how people around the world can enhance their knowledge and understanding of key historical events by accessing documents and collections online. We hope one day to make all existing knowledge in historical archives and collections available to all, including putting additional Dead Sea Scroll documents online.”

When you have something as priceless as the Dead Sea scrolls, you can’t just throw it on a scanner. Instead, digital photograpyArdon Bar-Ham allows us to see details which are invisible to the naked eye. The process, using an ultra-high resolution camera, produces images about two hundred times higher in resolution than those produced by standard cameras. Each snapshot used state-of-the-art UV-protected flash tubes and an exposure time of 1/4000th of a second to minimize any damage.

But enough talking, head on over to the home of the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls and explore this amazing find yourself!

On a makeshift runway in NYC, ancient Middle Eastern cultures combine into a singular, modern aesthetic. This is inSHALLOm, a project by fashion designers threeASFOUR meant to link Jewish and Arab aesthetics to demonstrate how the visual world binds these cultures to one another. Earlier today, threeASFOUR launched their Spring Summer 2012 collection as a part of New York’s Fashion Week. A big part of their new collection is the inSHALLOm project, which is a series of partnerships to bring both Arab and Jewish communities together through artistic collaboration. Both peoples are of course, intrinsically linked through shared cultural heritage in the Middle East, as both are born out of the Abrahamic faith and are cousins both linguistically and culturally.

threeASFOUR is working with local artisans and manufacturers to create a contemporary, affordable line of fashion and accessories influenced by both Middle East cultures. The goal is for the products to reflect their shared background, with elements of each culture molded into a  single representation of what the two peoples have in common.

More than just a series of hybrid designs for the fashion industry, threeASFOUR hopes that this will spark a new beginning of cross-cultural exchange. A quick look at the backgrounds of the designers and you can see that threeASFOUR  embraces diversity as it stems from their very origins. Adi Gil was born and raised in Israel; Gabi Asfour is of Palestinian descent born and raised in Beirut and Angela Donhauser is of Russian and German descent, born in Tajikistan and later raised in Germany. Fusion is a central tenet behind the work of threeASFOUR, and through design, they seek to create unity. More than just unity of form and function, any time you have three people in a room, as the saying goes, you get four opinions. But having designed together for over a decade, Adi, Gabi and Angela are able to reflect off the same sense of unity they seek to find in their work.

Coming up for the inSHALLOm project in November 2011 is a huge opening event at Tel Aviv’s Beit Ha’ir museum, complete with music, photography, architecture and more to, as threeASFOUR put it “promote cultural understanding through aesthetic unity.”

Yoko Ono who is going to contribute to the Beit Ha’ir Tel Aviv show, was in attendance today, along with her son, Sean Lennon (pictured above).

We’ll have more for you ahead of the Beit Ha’ir exhibit, so stay tuned!

photographer: Eilon Paz

In the upcoming September 2011, Wired presents their first annual look at the continent's rising stars. Talking about Israel's "Silicon Wadi," Wired writes that "the strip has produced so many widely adopted high-tech products -- from ICQ instant messaging, through wireless-internet technologies to USB memory sticks -- it is often seen as the closest international rival to California's iconic Silicon Valley."

Israel is a juggernaut of R&D, 4.5% of its economic output is immediately reinvested, making Israel number one in the world for R&D as a percentage of GDP. And the Holy Land is home to R&D departments of some of the world's most important tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Intel.

In the past few years, authors like Dan Senor have chronicled the importance of "chutzpah" in making Israel a tech startup juggernaut with books like Start Up Nation. The article in Wired magazine highlights not only Israel as a whole, but a small strip in Tel Aviv itself called Rothschild Boulevard. Speaking of the tech mecca within the tech mecca, the authors write, "stretching from Neve Tzedek in the south roughly to midtown, Rothschild is an elegant, treelined avenue popular with pedestrians, cyclists and rollerbladers enjoying the city's almost unending sunshine. On the pedestrian walkway that runs down its centre, a strip of hip, outdoor cafés is home to creative types on their laptops, thanks in no little part to the city's free, widespread Wi-Fi network."

To read more about Tel Aviv's hopping scene, or to see who else made Europe's Top 10, click here.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is rare among anxiety disorders in that its origins can be pinpointed not only based on genetic predisposition but to a specific moment in time. This severe anxiety disorder occurs following exposure to an event of significant psychological trauma. That event could be anything from a car crash to witnessing a terrorist attack. The disease is more common than you might think, with an estimated 7.8 percent of Americans experiencing PTSD at some point in their lives, according to the Nebraska Department of Veterans Affairs. Women are about twice as likely as men to suffer from PTSD, but one group, men and women, who have an extremely high disposition to developing post-traumatic stress disorder are military veterans. A shocking 30 percent of men and women who have served in war zones are believed to have suffered from PTSD. Read More on Isrealli.org