Five new Israeli-US academic projects in a variety of fields were recently given the go-ahead for joint collaboration between faculty and research scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). The joint research proposals are to focus on self-sustained agriculture, spinal cord injury treatments, tomato seed germination, online annotation tools, and photocurrent spectroscopy. The grants – to run January 2015 to August 2016 – were approved by the MIT-Israel-Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Seed Fund, part of the MIT International Science and Technology (MISTI) Initiative Global Seed Funds. BGU and MIT signed the agreement in May 2014 to create the fund to promote and support early-stage collaborations. It is the first seed MISTI seed fund in Israel, and covers travel and meeting costs to make international collaboration possible. (via Israel21c)

[ Photo: Yehudit Garinkol / Wikimedia Commons ]