Good news from the 100th smallest country, with less than 1/1000th of the world's population.

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Kodak buys third Israeli company. Kodak has signed a letter of intent to acquire RealTimeImage's Graphic Arts division. The deal is believed to be worth $20 million to $30m. The acquisition is Kodak's third in Israel in the past three months and follows a decision by the company to concentrate on digital imaging. Last November it purchased Scitex Digital Printing for $250m. in cash. A week before that, Kodak announced the acquisition of Ra'anana-based Algotec Systems, a developer of advanced picture archiving and communications systems, for $42.5m. in cash.

Israeli fertility technique 'fathers' 101 babies . One hundred and one healthy Israeli babies have been born in the last four years thanks to a technique developed and used exclusively at Bar-Ilan University that magnifies sperm up to 6,000 times and determines which are fittest to fertilize an ovum. According to Prof. Benjamin Bartoov, director of BIU's male infertility clinic, the pregnancy rate of the technique is about 48 percent and the "take home baby" rate 40% – double that resulting from ordinary sperm injection into human eggs.

Israeli bobsledders reach World Championships. Aaron Zeff, John Frank, and David Greaves managed to do in their first season of bobsledding what most people can only dream about. After competing in the Federation Internationale de Bobsleigh et du Toboganning America Cup Competition in Lake Placid, New York, and finishing fifth out of fifteen teams from six countries taking part, the blue-and-white squad secured a spot at the World Cup and the World Championships. The Israeli bobsled team is going to the World Cup!

Israeli Lie-detector glasses offer peek at future of security. It may not be long before you hear airport security screeners ask, "Do you plan on hijacking this plane?" A U.S. company using technology developed in Israel is pitching a lie detector small enough to fit in the eyeglasses of law enforcement officers, and its inventors say it can tell whether a passenger is a terrorist by analyzing his answer to that simple question in real-time. The technology, developed by mathematician Amir Lieberman at Nemesysco in Zuran, Israel, for military, insurance claim and law enforcement use, is being repackaged and retargeted for personal and corporate applications by V Entertainment. The company showed plain sunglasses outfitted with the technology at the 2004 International CES in Las Vegas earlier this month. The system used green, yellow and red color codes to indicate a "true," "maybe" or "false" response. The heart of Nemesysco's security-oriented technology is a signal-processing engine that is said to use more than 8,000 algorithms each time it analyzes an incoming voice waveform. In this way it detects levels of various emotional states simultaneously from the pitch and speed of the voice. The law enforcement version achieved about 70 percent accuracy in laboratory trials, according to V Entertainment, and better than 90 percent accuracy against real criminal subjects at a beta test site at the U.S. Air Force's Rome Laboratories. The technology delivers not only a true/false reading, but a range of high-level parameters, such as "thinking level," which measures how much as subject has thought about an answer they give, and "SOS level," which assesses how badly a person doesn't want to talk about a subject.

Flash Memory Field Poised For Growth from Israeli Technology. The flash memory market's heating up, with two of the world's leading chipmakers adding fuel to the fire Wednesday. Germany's Infineon Technologies AG designed its first ever flash chip with Saifun Semiconductors, a small Israeli firm. South Korea's Samsung Group, meanwhile, agreed to license flash technology from Israel's M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers Ltd. Flash memory is used to store data in cell phones, digital cameras and other devices.

British insurance cheats face Israeli lie detector. Some people blush, some stutter and others become aggressive, but the British insurance industry can discover if somebody is lying without even seeing them, thanks to technology developed by the Israeli security forces. The device is used by phone to find out whether or not somebody is telling the truth over a claim: some allege things have been stolen or smashed when they were actually sold, or blame other people for damage they did themselves. The level of fraud detection has jumped from 5 percent to 18 percent since it was introduced.

Israelis create 'rain making' machine. Israeli researchers are now working on a rain making machines to turn inhospitable desert land into fertile agricultural soil. Israeli scientists may have found a secret formula to turn the arid desert at Negev in southern Israel. The researchers have been working on their project in Jerusalem's Hebrew University. The long-term goal is to turn the prototype into a contraption that can be flown through clouds and sow them to cause rainfall over deserts or other areas that need water. The scientists have created an artificial cloud made up of tiny water particles so light that they float in the air. A special electrical appliance is used to charge up these particles so that they become bigger and heavier to fall on the ground as rain.

Resurgence in tourism in Israel, arrivals up 23% A sharp rise of 23 percent in tourist arrivals to 1.06 million in 2003 signaled a resurgence in the tourism sector. In December, tourist arrivals were 119,000, higher than both the previous year and for the record tourism year of 2000.

Israeli Technology Enabled Mars Pictures. The recent pictures of Mars transmitted to NASA and viewed across the globe were made possible, in part, by the research of three scientists from Haifa’s Technion. Hewlett Packard Labs said that the pictures transmitted from the Mars explorer "Spirit," were made possible due to the Israeli research team. The unique image-compression algorithm was developed by Gadi Sarousi, HP Labs’ Director of its Information Theory Research group, as well as Guillermo Shapiro and Marcelo Weinberger. HP said that the compression technology enabled the sending of the high-quality photos from Mars in a short period, saving billions of dollars. The more data you have coming in, the larger the antenna farms you have to build. If the data is compressed, the number of antennas and the amount of space they cover is much smaller.

Israel scientists make colon cancer cell breakthrough. Researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute have managed for the first time to halt the spread of colon cancer cells in laboratory tests. Their breakthrough could help pharmaccologists develop drugs to prevent or reverse colon cancer, which is the second most common form of cancer in men and third with women.

Israeli-developed chemical laser lauded as significant breakthrough. The U.S. security establishment and defense community has taken notice of a recent achievement of the Department of Physics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev - the development of an iodine chemical laser with a record efficiency level. In the journal of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Israeli Chemical Oxygen-Iodine Laser is noted as one of the significant breakthroughs of 2003.

Facts about the 100th smallest country, with less than 1/1000th of the world's population.


  • Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees to the population in the world.
  • Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
  • In 1984 and 1991, Israel airlifted a total of 22,000 Ethiopian Jews at risk in Ethiopia to safety in Israel.
  • When Golda Meir was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1969, she became the world's second elected female leader in modern times.
  • When the U. S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya was bombed in 1998, Israeli rescue teams were on the scene within a day - and saved three victims from the rubble.
  • Israel has the third highest rate of entrepreneurship - and the highest rate among women and among people over 55 - in the world.
  • Relative to its population, Israel is the largest immigrant-absorbing nation on earth. Immigrants come in search of democracy, religious freedom, and economic opportunity.
  • Israel was the first nation in the world to adopt the Kimberly process, an international standard that certifies diamonds as "conflict free."
  • Israel has the world's second highest per capita of new books.
  • Israel is the only country in the world that entered the 21st century with a net gain in its number of trees, made more remarkable because this was achieved in an area considered mainly desert.
  • Israel has more museums per capita than any other country.
  • Israel leads the world in the number of scientists and technicians in the workforce, with 145 per 10,000, as opposed to 85 in the U.S., over 70 in Japan, and less than 60 in Germany. With over 25% of its work force employed in technical professions. Israel places first in this category as well.
  • Israel has the highest per capita ratio of scientific publications in the world by a large margin, as well as one of the highest per capita rates of patents filed.
  • In proportion to its population, Israel has the largest number of startup companies in the world. In absolute terms, Israel has the largest number of startup companies than any other country in the world, except the US (3,500 companies mostly in hi-tech).
  • Israel is ranked #2 in the world for VC funds right behind the US.
  • Israel has the highest percentage in the world of home computers per capita.
  • Outside the United States and Canada, Israel has the largest number of NASDAQ listed companies
  • Israel has the highest average living standards in the Middle East. The per capita income in 2000 is over $17,500, exceeding that of the UK.
  • With more than 3,000 high-tech companies and start-ups, Israel has the highest concentration of hi-tech companies in the world (apart from the Silicon Valley).
  • With an aerial arsenal of over 250 F-16s, Israel has the largest fleet of the aircraft outside of the US.
  • Israel's $100 billion economy is larger than all of its immediate neighbors combined.
  • The cell phone was developed in Israel by Motorola-Israel. Motorola built its largest development center worldwide in Israel.
  • Windows NT software was developed by Microsoft-Israel.
  • The Pentium MMX Chip technology was designed in Israel at Intel.
  • Voice mail technology was developed in Israel.
  • AOL's instant message program was designed by an Israeli software company.
  • Both Microsoft and Cisco built their only R&D facilities outside the US in Israel
  • The city of Beer Sheva in Israel has the highest percentage in the world of Chess Grand Masters per capita – one for every 22,875 residents.
  • On a per capita basis, Israel has the largest number of biotech start-ups
  • Israel has the largest raptor migration in the world, with hundreds of thousands of African birds of prey crossing as they fan out into Asia.
  • Twenty-four percent of Israel's workforce holds university degrees -- ranking third in the industrialized world, after the United States and Holland -- and 12 percent hold advanced degrees.