It is the most expensive seaweed known to medical history: a new heart-healing gel based on brown seaweed has been licensed by the New Jersey-based company Ikaria Holdings.

The Israeli company BioLineRx, founded in 2003, released the news that one of its two compounds the BL-1040 is designed to repair damaged heart muscles after cardiac arrest.

Israeli Scientists from the University of Haifa, Professors Simcha Lev-Yadun, Gidi Ne’eman and Gadi Katzir investigated the desert rhubarb, Rheum Palaestinum, during a trip with students to the Negev. Unlike most desert plants, it has broad leaves with many grooves that channel rainwater straight to its roots. This rare desert plant “waters itself,” enabling it to receive 16 times the amount of rainwater that falls on it each year. Approximately 75 millimeters of rain fall on the rhubarb’s habitat yearly, hence the plant’s unique irrigation system provides it with 425 millimeters reaching its roots. Rain generally reaches about one centimeter into the ground, however the rhubarb’s irrigation system takes the water ten centimeters under the earth to the deepest part of its roots.
Leaf Grooves and notches on each leaf’s surface are a miniature imitation of the topography of the surrounding desert mountains and wadis, maximizing the amount of water flowing to the plant’s roots. In addition, they pointed out that the leaves have a wax covering which helps the water flow. [See photos below] No other desert plant in the world does this. The Israeli Scientists discoveries were published recently in the journal Naturwissenshcaften.

Archaeologists discovered a quarter-acre (one dunam) quarry in Jerusalem that was the source for mammoth stones used by Herod to build the Second Temple. The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) discovered the quarry prior to the planned construction of apartment buildings on Shmuel HaNavi Street.
The ancient quarry dates back 2,030 years, according to excavation director Dr. Ofer Sion. The immense size of the stones, which measure up to three meters long and two meters high and wide, “indicates that the large stones that were quarried at the site were destined for use in the construction of Herod’s magnificent projects in Jerusalem, including the Temple walls.

A large work force among Herod’s estimated 10,000 laborers produced the stones by creating detachment channels with the use of a one-pound chisel. After the channels were formed, the stones were severed from the bedrock using hammers and chisels.

Historical sources indicate that in order to build the Temple and other projects which Herod constructed, such as his palace, hundreds of thousands of various size stones were required, most of them weighing between two and five tons each. The dimensions of the stones that were produced in the quarry were suitable for the Temple walls.

“The massive quarrying effort, on the order of hundreds of thousands of stones, lowered the topography of Jerusalem in the vicinity of the Old City. Today, with the exposure of this quarry, the intensity of the building projects as described in the historical sources can be proven. Herod began quarrying closest to the Temple and worked away from it initially he exploited the stone on the nearby ridges and then he moved on to quarry in more distant regions. Dr. Sion described the ancient “high-tech method of removing and transporting the stones on rolling wooden fixtures, some of which were pulled by camels.

Other artifacts discovered at the site include metal plates, referred to in the Talmud and which were used as fulcrums to sever the stones from the bedrock, as well as coins and pottery shards from the end of the Second Temple period in the first century, before the beginning of the non-Jewish calendar.

More than 60 people worked on the dig, which lasted approximately two weeks. [Documented June 2009]