Technion scientists

Technion researchers and partners at Tianjin University say managing carbon dioxide, rather than eliminating it, could make low-cost fuel cells more durable and practical for vehicles, drones and remote power systems

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Tianjin University in China say they have developed a new approach that could make hydrogen fuel cells more affordable, durable and efficient while allowing them to operate with ambient air.

Their findings, published in Nature Energy, focus on anion-exchange membrane fuel cells, or AEMFCs, which generate electricity through a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen. Unlike some conventional fuel cell technologies, AEMFCs can use cheaper and more abundant materials, potentially reducing system costs.

The technology is being studied for use in transportation, aviation, aerospace, drones, distributed energy systems, backup power and electricity generation in remote areas.

The study was led by Prof. Dario Dekel of the Technion’s Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering and the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program; Prof. Michael Guiver, a polymer membrane expert at Tianjin University; Dr. Karam Yassin, manager of the Technion’s Central Hydrogen Technologies Laboratory; and Dr. Sapir Willdorf-Cohen, a researcher in Dekel’s group.

The main challenges in developing AEMFCs have been improving power output, energy efficiency, performance and durability.

Until now, carbon dioxide in ambient air has largely been treated as a contaminant that harms performance and shortens fuel cell durability. The researchers propose what they call “CO2 management,” arguing that carbon dioxide should not be viewed only as an obstacle but as a factor that can be controlled and, under some conditions, used to improve fuel cell stability.

“For years, carbon dioxide has been considered one of the main challenges facing AEM fuel cells,” Dekel said. “Our work shows that the picture is more nuanced. Under certain conditions, carbon dioxide may contribute to the long-term stability of fuel cell materials. By learning how to manage CO2 rather than simply eliminate it, we can pave the way toward affordable, durable and high-performance fuel cells capable of operating directly with ambient air.”

The researchers said the findings could help speed the adoption of hydrogen fuel cells in passenger vehicles, trains, drones, ships, distributed energy systems and autonomous power technologies.

The research was supported by the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program, the Israel Science Foundation, the Israeli Council for Higher Education and other funding partners.

Technion-led study combines deep learning and mathematical modelling to produce dynamic MRI images at up to one frame per second.

A group of researchers from the Technion in Israel and the United States has reported a breakthrough in MRI scanning that could significantly improve breast cancer diagnosis, according to a paper published in Nature Communications.

The researchers developed a new method, called ELITE, that accelerates and enhances MRI scans used in breast cancer imaging, a disease diagnosed in approximately 2.3 million people each year, most of them women. The approach combines artificial intelligence with advanced mathematical modelling to enable dynamic MRI imaging at what the researchers describe as unprecedented speed and accuracy.

Dr. Eddy Solomon
Dr. Eddy Solomon. (Leo DeLuca)

The international study brings together expertise in engineering, MRI physics, artificial intelligence and clinical radiology.

Dr. Eddy Solomon of the Technion’s Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, the study’s lead author, said the research focuses on dynamic MRI, a key tool in breast cancer diagnosis. Dynamic MRI is primarily used for screening high-risk populations and is characterised by high sensitivity, with more than 90% accuracy, compared with roughly 50-60% for ultrasound and mammography combined.

However, MRI technology has long faced a fundamental limitation: producing highly detailed images requires relatively long scan times, making it difficult to track the movement of contrast material through tissue in real time. Traditional MRI systems typically generate one image every one to two minutes at best, limiting the ability to capture the rapid dynamics of contrast agents.

Dr. Solomon and his colleagues sought to bridge this gap by combining mathematical modeling that identifies structural and functional patterns in different tissues with a deep neural network (ResNet) trained to remove noise and distortions. The system also reconstructs missing information from undersampled measurements.

The result, according to the researchers, is the ability to generate one image per second.

The improved temporal resolution allows clinicians to track the movement of contrast agents almost continuously. This, the researchers say, could improve the detection of small tumours, help distinguish more accurately between benign and malignant growths, and better characterise tumour biology, including blood flow and vascular permeability.

In a study involving 54 patients, the researchers reported improved tumour visibility compared with existing methods, higher image quality, and strong diagnostic sensitivity.

They also said that shorter scan times could increase the number of patients that can be scanned using a given MRI system, potentially improving access to imaging services.

The findings are presented as a step toward faster and more precise MRI-based cancer diagnostics, though further validation and clinical deployment would be required before broader adoption.

Concrete shapes the world you live in, but its environmental toll is massive. Imagine, though, if the buildings around you could grow and breathe, helping to heal the planet. This isn’t science fiction. It’s the vision of CyanoCement. Developed by researchers from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, this innovative biocement uses ancient microbes to redefine how we think about construction materials.

At the heart of CyanoCement are cyanobacteria, tiny photosynthetic organisms responsible for Earth’s first oxygen-rich atmosphere. By leveraging these extraordinary capabilities, the team—Perla Armaly, Yuval Berger, Lubov Iliassafov, Keren Rosenblau, Yechezkel Kashi, and Shany Barath—crafted a process where these microbes bind minerals and precipitate calcium carbonate, creating a solid without high emissions.

Petri dish with cyanobacteria cultures on a laboratory table.

Innovative Design Meets Environmental Responsibility

This biocement doesn’t just end its environmental work once installed. It continues to capture carbon dioxide from the air, actively working against the problem of atmospheric carbon. Unlike conventional methods, CyanoCement turns construction into part of the solution.

Construction worker applying biocement to a brick wall surface.

The material is designed for facades, interior panels, and decorative structures. By focusing on non-load-bearing elements, the team keeps the project’s ambitions grounded, managing expectations with scientific precision.

Close-up of biocement texture with visible green cyanobacteria.

Visible Green: A Living, Breathing Material

The green hue of CyanoCement isn’t painted on. It’s the color of life—indicative of the cyanobacteria within. The design makes environmental benefits visible, offering a reassuring sign that sustainability is working, right before your eyes.

Lab technician measuring pH level of biocement solution.

This innovative project emerged from the Disrupt Design Lab at Technion, in collaboration with the Applied Genomics Lab, marking a significant crossover between architecture and biology. It’s a fusion rarely seen, yet wholly necessary for the future of sustainable design.

For a unique blend of nature and architecture, explore how the Sofia Pavilion blends urban landscapeswith natural elements.

Construction site using eco-friendly biocement blocks in foundation.

CyanoCement was honored with the Green Product Award, celebrated for its meaningful impact and robust research. It’s not just talk—this material has substance and intention.

Learn how ancient materials are making a comeback with Finnish designers crafting fashion from shipwreck timber.

Green biocement samples displayed on a laboratory workbench.

As we think about the future of architecture and sustainability, it’s time to reconsider the role of construction. CyanoCement poses a radical idea: buildings that are not only structures but contributors to the atmosphere. An idea that’s difficult to ignore once it takes root in your mind.

Researcher writing down observations of growing cyanobacteria samples.

Large language models are an innovative tool transforming a wide range of tasks, including translation, text comprehension, and code generation. However, these models also have shortcomings that require improvement, including biases, disregard for instructions, and “hallucinations” (i.e. the generation of inaccurate information).

These challenges are a major focus of the research group led by Dr. Haggai Maron from the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technion, in collaboration with researchers from other universities and NVIDIA. Recently, three papers by the group were accepted to the most prestigious conferences in computational learning: ICLR 2026, NeurIPS 2025, and AAAI 2026. The papers were led by Ph.D. student Guy Bar-Shalom (co-advised by Prof. Ran El-Yaniv) and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Fabrizio Frasca, in collaboration with Dr. Yftah Ziser (University of Groningen and NVIDIA).

מימין לשמאל: ד"ר פבריציו פרסקה, ד"ר חגי מרון וגיא בר שלום
In the photo, from left to right: Guy Bar-Shalom, Dr. Haggai Maron, Fabrizio Frasca

Dr. Maron and his team propose a new research direction for identifying failures and flaws in text generated by large language models. Instead of attempting to fully understand how the model operates at every level (something that remains beyond the current reach of the research community), the authors suggest a more pragmatic, inexpensive, and faster approach. Their method is based on building and deploying new machine-learning systems on top of the models’ internal computations, in a way that leverages the complex internal structure of those computations. The goal is for these learning systems to detect and utilize hidden information embedded within these computations, even if humans do not fully understand it. The key achievement is demonstrating the possibility of externally and inexpensively monitoring and diagnosing risks. This approach enables users to supervise the model, predict its behavior, and control it without fully understanding the entire mechanism.

The research addresses one of the most critical challenges of the AI era: how to identify when a large language model is making mistakes, fabricating information, or deviating from expected behavior. The methods developed at the Technion provide rapid and effective diagnostics that do not depend on understanding the entire mechanism or the model’s training process.

The new approach opens broad practical possibilities, including the development of warning systems, quality assurance tools, and safety standards for language models used in medicine, research, education, regulation, and other fields. This marks an important step toward the responsible integration of artificial intelligence into critical systems and toward making AI tools more reliable.

This series of studies is part of a broader research program in Dr. Maron’s laboratory, where the group investigates how patterns can be learned from new types of data that can be extracted from trained models, such as their weights and signals used during training.

Time to Move technology gives users control over motion in AI-generated videos without retraining models or requiring massive computing power

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed a technology that allows users to control movement in AI-generated videos using simple mouse gestures, without requiring large computing resources or retraining on massive video datasets.

The system, called Time to Move, or TTM, was developed by Dr. Or Litany of the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science, together with Prof. Ron Kimmel and students Asaf Singer, Noam Rotstein and Amir Mann.

Litany presented the research last month at the International Conference on Learning Representations, or ICLR 2026, in Brazil. The conference is considered one of the leading global gatherings in deep learning and artificial intelligence.

The technology is designed to address one of the key limitations of AI video generation: the difficulty of precisely controlling how objects and characters move over time. “Our development solves one of the main limitations of AI-based video generation: the difficulty of precisely controlling the movement of objects and characters over time,” Litany said.

He said TTM can be integrated as a plug-in into existing video models and does not require retraining. Unlike earlier approaches that require model-specific adaptation and significant computing power, the Technion system operates without additional computational cost, he said.

“In doing so, it helps democratise AI video creation by expanding access beyond giant companies such as Google and Meta,” Litany said.

The key innovation behind the technology is a method called dual-clock denoising, which refines motion while balancing the user’s intended movement with natural-looking video results.

Experiments conducted by the researchers showed that TTM matched training-based methods and outperformed them in motion accuracy and realism, according to the Technion. The system also allows users to edit the appearance of objects and add new objects to a scene, capabilities not offered by some earlier trained methods.

Researchers said the technology represents a step toward more intuitive and controllable tools for generative video.

Litany joined the Technion’s computer science faculty as a senior lecturer in 2023 after being selected as an Azrieli Faculty Fellow and a Taub Fellow. He previously completed postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University and FAIR at Meta and has worked on computer vision technologies.

For decades, the Energy Tower by Dan Zaslavsky was one of the most audacious clean-energy ideas never built. And it was the first story we covered when Green Prophet was founded in 2007!

Dan Zaslavsky date unknown
Dan Zaslavsky date unknown

Conceived by Dr. Phillip Carlson and championed by Professor Dan Zaslavsky of the Technion in Israel, the Energy Tower proposed something almost magical: spray seawater into the top of a giant desert tower, cool the hot air, let it plunge downward at high speed, and generate electricity through turbines at the base. The hotter and drier the desert, the better it would work. Zaslavsky envisioned towers over 1,000 metres tall rising from the Negev, Jordan Valley, and Red Sea region, generating power day and night while potentially producing fresh water.

Energy Tower
The Energy Tower

The idea never made the leap from drawings and engineering studies to full-scale construction. We have the original PDF proposal and science —> LINK HERE

The UN advertised its potential in 2001 but noted then that the $20M USD cost to build it was limiting. But nearly two decades after most people stopped talking about it, the concept is quietly evolving in two unexpected places: China and Iran. The concept let dreamers dream and doers do – figuring out more pleasing designs and engineering.

The Downdraft Energy Tower
The Downdraft Energy Tower

China turns the Energy Tower into a climate machine

The Chinese methane paper, on the other hand, is much closer to the original Energy Tower because it explicitly describes spraying water into the top of the tower to create the downdraft, exactly as Carlson and Zaslavsky envisioned.
The Chinese methane paper, on the other hand, is much closer to the original Energy Tower because it explicitly describes spraying water into the top of the tower to create the downdraft, exactly as Carlson and Zaslavsky envisioned.

In 2023, researchers from the University of Edinburgh, Wuhan University of Technology and other institutions revisited the downdraft Energy Tower concept with a new purpose: removing methane from the atmosphere. Their study proposed that the humid air released from a downdraft tower could increase the formation of hydroxyl radicals, the atmosphere’s primary cleanser and the main natural sink for methane.

Downdraft Energy Tower (DET)

The researchers estimated that a tower 1,200 metres high and 400 metres in diameter could generate roughly 380 MW of electricity while simultaneously helping remove atmospheric methane. They calculated that a single Jordan-based tower could remove approximately 12.5 tonnes of methane per day under ideal conditions.

Whether those numbers hold up in practice remains to be seen. No commercial-scale downdraft Energy Tower has yet been built. But the research marks a remarkable shift. The tower is no longer viewed merely as a power plant. It is being reimagined as a tool for climate remediation.

Iran transforms the tower into a vertical oasis

Energy Tower from Iran
Iranian Energy Tower

Meanwhile, a team of Iranian architects received an Honorable Mention in the 2025 Skyscraper Competition for their “Regenerative Tower” proposal on Iran’s Makran coast.

Unlike Zaslavsky’s energy-focused concept, the Iranian project imagines the tower as an entire ecosystem. The design combines wind energy generation, atmospheric water harvesting, food production, housing and climate adaptation in a single 200-metre structure.

The tower’s twin wind shafts generate energy. A butterfly-like exoskeleton captures moisture from the air. Vertical farms produce vegetables, fruit and medicinal crops. Residential rings provide shaded housing inspired by traditional Baluchi architecture. The project claims it could generate up to 15,000 litres of water per day while recycling nearly all of its water in a closed-loop system.

Iran energy tower
Iran’s Energy Tower

Although the project does not explicitly employ the classic evaporative downdraft system developed by Carlson and Zaslavsky, its philosophy is strikingly similar: use desert heat, wind and humidity not as obstacles but as resources.

What links these projects is not simply a tower. It is a way of thinking.

Carlson and Zaslavsky believed deserts should not be viewed as barren landscapes waiting for resources to be imported. They believed deserts themselves contained enormous untapped energy. Heat, dryness, wind and seawater could be transformed into electricity, water and prosperity.

China’s methane-removal research expands the concept into the realm of climate engineering. Iran’s Regenerative Tower expands it into urban design and community resilience.

Neither project has yet delivered a functioning tower. But both suggest that Zaslavsky’s dream may have been ahead of its time. From the engineering literature, Carlson appears to have been an American engineer/inventor, and the concept emerged in the United States before being adopted and extensively studied in Israel during the 1970s–1990s. The Israeli work is much better documented than Carlson’s own biography.

Nearly half a century after its invention, Dan Zaslavsky’s giant Energy Tower may finally be finding its moment.

Students in a new Technion program say they feel safer in the Jewish state than in France.

“You’re from the Jewish school?” the French Ministry of Education official quizzed the teenage girl who had come for her post-high school baccalaureate exam.

The examiner began firing off the most difficult questions on the physics test, seemingly seeking to trip up the high school senior, but Noa Uziel, 18, who was at the top of her class at Paris’s Yabne school, stood her ground.

“Are you going to cry?” the Education Ministry official pressed her. “I am the one who chooses the questions.”

A life journey changed by Oct. 7

It was more than a year earlier, after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, that Uziel had already decided she wanted to move to Israel, abandoning her previous plans to study in France.

“At that moment, I felt that it was no longer the same,” Uziel recounted in an interview with JNS in the northern Israeli port city of Haifa, where she is currently studying in a new Israeli educational program aimed at helping students gain admission to one of the world’s leading engineering schools.

The intensive nine-month preparatory program in Israel, Prépa MAT, is designed for outstanding French-speaking high school science graduates. It aims to prepare international students for admission to—and academic success at—the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

“I knew that even if I wanted to help Israel from Paris, it would not be the same as living here,” she said, recalling her fear of taking the one-hour train and metro commute to her Jewish high school in the months following the Oct. 7 attacks.

The Jewish high school senior went on to pass the national exam, albeit with a lower score than her grade-point average. A complaint filed against the official—who, it later emerged, had repeatedly singled out the handful of Jewish students taking the test—went unanswered.

French students Shani Allal and Noa Uziel in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, June 2, 2026. Credit: Prepa Mat Technion.
French students Shani Allal and Noa Uziel in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, June 2, 2026. Credit: Prepa Mat Technion.

A new beginning

Last October, Uziel was one of 21 French teens selected from 50 applicants to join the new program in Haifa, which is run under the auspices of Masa Israel Journey and includes intensive training in mathematics, physics, psychometric exam preparation and a Hebrew-language ulpan.

Since its founding in 2004, Masa Israel Journey has brought more than 220,000 young Jewish adults from over 60 countries to Israel through a variety of educational programs aimed at immersing Diaspora Jews in Israeli society.

The wartime launch of the new program comes at a time of growing uncertainty for Jewish communities abroad, particularly in France, home to some 450,000 Jews and the largest Muslim population in Europe. A recent survey found that nearly four out of five French Jews feel unsafe.

Even the air-raid sirens that sounded this winter during Iranian missile and rocket attacks—which participants said offered a different perspective on Israel than previous visits during peacetime—left them largely unfazed because of the unity they encountered.

“Despite the hard reality of the war, I found here a family,” Uziel said.

‘I feel freer here’

“I feel freer living here as a Jew,” said Shani Allal, 17, who told JNS she previously felt compelled to hide both her Judaism and her visits to Israel from classmates at her public high school in Paris, where “Free Palestine” stickers covered the walls.

“I didn’t tell anybody except my family and close friends that I was coming to Israel because I was afraid there was going to be a reaction,” she said.

The teenager, whose older brother moved to Israel several years ago, said she always knew she would eventually make the move herself.

“The only question was right after high school or later on,” she said.

She ultimately chose to come last fall despite the regional turmoil, leaving behind rising antisemitism in Europe and embracing new challenges, including rocket and missile alerts during the war.

While participants in the program arrived in Israel on their own, Allal said her parents plan to join her this summer.

“Here we are free,” she said.

Technion-developed technology allows patients to detect dangerous sleep disorders from home using a simple wearable device and artificial intelligence, eliminating need for costly lab tests.

Nearly 40% of the global population suffers from sleep-related disorders, according to the World Health Organization. Among the most serious, and often undiagnosed, conditions is sleep apnea, a disorder estimated to affect nearly one billion people worldwide.

Diagnosing sleep apnea traditionally requires an overnight stay in a specialised sleep laboratory, such as the facility at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. 

Patients are connected to multiple sensors that monitor brain activity, breathing patterns, heart rate, and oxygen levels throughout the night. The process is complex, expensive, and often inaccessible, with costs ranging from $1,170 to $11,700 depending on the clinic.

An Israeli startup, Sleep AI, aims to change that. Developed by researchers at the Technion, the technology uses a lightweight oximeter linked to a mobile app and powered by artificial intelligence. Patients can complete the test from home by simply wearing the device overnight while data is uploaded to the company’s cloud platform for analysis.

Within minutes, physicians receive a detailed medical report that not only evaluates sleep quality, but also maps sleep architecture, identifies signs of sleep apnea, and assesses cardiovascular risks linked to nighttime oxygen deprivation.

Unlike consumer smartwatches, Sleep AI is designed as a medical-grade diagnostic tool. In clinical testing conducted in sleep centres, the system demonstrated an overall accuracy rate of 89% for detecting sleep apnea, rising to 99% for moderate and severe cases.

The company is now pursuing international regulatory approvals with the goal of making sleep apnea diagnosis faster, cheaper, and more widely available — potentially even covered by health insurance in the future.

By moving diagnosis from the sleep lab to the home, Sleep AI hopes to make sleep health screening a routine part of modern medical care.

Technion researchers have developed, for the first time, a comprehensive physical model explaining how the properties of a radiating material, including absorption, emission, and quantum efficiency, affect the fundamental characteristics of the light it emits as a function of temperature. In essence, the emitted light changes its color, intensity, and randomness according to the material’s properties and its temperature. The discovery was published in Optica and opens new possibilities for designing advanced light sources, optical sensors, and thermally based photonic systems.

The research was led by M.Sc. student Tomer Bar-Lev and Prof. Carmel Rotschild from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion. According to the researchers, the central phenomenon examined in this work is photoluminescence, a process in which a material emits light in response to incident illumination. In this phenomenon, light particles (photons) are absorbed by the material and re-emitted, forming the basis of many technologies, including LED lighting and optical sensors.

The Technion researchers demonstrated that the influence of fundamental physical laws formulated more than a century ago is far broader than previously thought.

At the beginning of the 20th century, physicist Max Planck showed that a body in thermodynamic equilibrium emits radiation depending on its temperature and material properties. Another German physicist, Gustav Kirchhoff, showed that under the same conditions, a material’s absorption and emission properties must be identical.

The new work by Technion researchers extends beyond the specific case of thermal radiation to all types of radiation, generalizing the relationship between matter and radiation out of equilibrium. Moreover, in their paper, they present a general equation that enables prediction and, crucially, design of the nature of light emitted from luminescent materials.

The new model describes how increasing temperature gradually transforms the emitted light, from well-defined, narrowband emission, such as that of an LED, to broad, multicolored radiation like sunlight. In doing so, the model fully explains, for the first time, how these two phenomena are fundamentally connected.

This scientific discovery paves the way for controlling the properties of light simply by adjusting temperature. Potential future developments include advanced optical devices, communications technologies, precise sensing, and applications in optical cooling and heat management.

According to Prof. Rotschild, “The model we developed provides a broad foundation for understanding light properties and for designing radiation sources with the material characteristics we desire. It offers a new physical framework for the light sources of the next generation.”

The groundbreaking system locates the relevant building permit within municipal archives, rapidly analyses it, and transmits accessible, actionable information directly to rescuers’ mobile devices

The recent ballistic missile attacks from Iran, which claimed the lives of dozens of Israelis, have underscored the urgent need for rescue teams to access precise, real-time information about damaged buildings and the options for extracting civilians trapped inside. In response, researchers from the Technion and the University of Haifa have developed an AI-based tool that delivers critical data at unprecedented speed.

According to the researchers, every building in Israel is documented through its construction permit. However, many local authorities struggle to retrieve these documents in real time. Even in advanced cities such as Tel Aviv, permits are often printed and physically delivered by courier to support rescue efforts; a time-consuming process that can delay operations and reduce the chances of saving lives.

The innovative tool developed by the Technion and University of Haifa teams retrieves building permits directly from municipal systems, analyzes them, and rapidly provides precise engineering information about the damaged structure. This information is sent directly to rescuers in the field via their mobile devices, enabling more efficient and effective rescue operations. The researchers have already begun collaborating with city engineers in Nahariya and Gedera to help save lives and support residents who have lost their homes.

Architect Tal Sadeh
Architect Tal Sadeh
Dr. Yiftach Ashkenazi (Credit: Noa Tal)
Dr. Yiftach Ashkenazi (Credit: Noa Tal)
Prof. Moshe Lavee
Prof. Moshe Lavee
Prof. Yael Allweil (Credit: Lucy Mor Haim)
Prof. Yael Allweil (Credit: Lucy Mor Haim)

From the Technion, members of the Housing Lab research group participated in the development: Prof. Yael Allweil, Dr. Yiftach Ashkenazi, and architect Tal Sadeh. From the Elijah Lab at the University of Haifa, Prof. Moshe Lavee, and Liat Bonen. The researchers also thank the Nur Lab for facilitating the connection with the Home Front Command.