eretz

Subsidized Tickets
Help Parents Of
Lone Soldiers

U.S.-Israel
Cannabis
Sleep Aid

Nefesh B’Nefesh and EL Al Israel Airlines are partner-
ing to offer partially subsidized plane tickets between
any El Al gateway city in North America and Israel for
parents of Lone Soldiers. The tickets will be allocated
to families whose financial limitations prevent them
from otherwise reuniting.
Drafting and serving in the Israeli Defense Forces
(IDF) can be a challenging experience for Lone
Soldiers, as well as deeply emotional for parents. A
soldier participates in an average of three ceremonies
throughout his or her IDF service: the “swearing-in
ceremony” (Tekes Hashba’ah), the “acceptance into
his or her unit” (Tekes Kumta) and the “end of basic
training” (Tekes Sof Maslul).
There are restrictions on the subsidized ticketing.
To learn more, contact Nefesh B’Nefesh at
lonesoldierparent@nbn.org.il. •

American pharmaceutical company CannRx and
accelerator iCAN: Israel-Cannabis have partnered to
launch a sleep aid called ican.sleep made from cannabis
extracts. The product will be the first pharmaceutical-
grade cannabis formulation for sleep on the market,
and could be a boon for the pharmaceutical industry
in Israel, said Bill Levine, the executive chairman of
CannRx Technologies.
The product will consist of a precise cannabis for-
mulation that will be inhaled by users for a rapid onset.
The formulation will also determine the duration of
users’ sleep.
“You take a puff or two, depending upon the dos-
age, and basically within 10 minutes you’ll be drowsy
enough to sleep,” Levine said. “We can give you a pre-
dictable, dose-dependent response every single time.”
The companies announced the new product at the
CannaTech medical cannabis conference in Tel Aviv
recently. CannRx and iCAN plan to launch the sleep
supplement globally following patent trials this year.
Similar, existing products are meant to be swallowed
and are unpredictable because medical cannabis prod-
ucts tend to be hard to control, Levine said.
Israel’s progress in successfully medicalizing and
controlling cannabis was a common theme at the
CannaTech conference.
“We’re doing more research in Israel than anywhere
else. We have destigmatized better than other places,
and we have an approach to medicalizing cannabis,
rather than legalizing cannabis,” Kaye said. •

Israeli Innovation
For Work Naps

Do you sometimes feel sleepy at work? Much like George
Costanza, who in a 1997 Seinfeld episode devised a way
to discretely nap under his office desk at Yankee Stadium,
you may be looking for quiet corners to snooze. Now an
Israeli design studio has produced an accessory for your
desk that they aptly named “For the Rest.” It was created
by industrial designer Assaf Israel and architect Sharon
Liverant, a pair of Israelis from the hip Tel Aviv-based
design company Joynout.
How does it work? The design takes the existing parti-
tion that separates your workspace from that of your
coworkers, and transforms it into a surface for you to
rest your head on and nap. Simply fold the partition, rest
against the padded part of the stand, and go to sleep. •

48

April 27 • 2017

jn

Scientist
Says Trees
Can Share

Trees are truly amazing. Besides
producing nearly half the Earth’s
oxygen, providing habitat for
millions of species, and creat-
ing the soil and timber resources
we depend on, trees also do one
more surprising thing: They share
resources, Israeli researchers
show.
Weizmann Institute’s Dr. Tamir
Klein recently made such a star-
tling discovery, his supervisors
at first declared the finding must
have been a mistake. In the forest,
trees are known to compete for
resources such as light and nutri-
ents, but Klein found the same
trees also engage in sharing.
Klein showed that the carbon
molecules taken up by the cano-
pies of mature spruce trees were
passed through the soil in surpris-
ingly large quantities to neighbor-
ing beech, larch and pine. As Klein
recently reported in the presti-
gious scientific journal Science,
the carbon was being transferred
via “underground highways”
formed by overlapping networks
of root fungi.
“Neighboring trees interact
with one another in complex
ways,” Klein said in a statement.
“Of course, there is a great deal
of competition among them, but
they also form communities, sort
of ‘guilds,’ within which individual
trees share valuable resources. In
fact, trees belonging to a ‘guild’
usually do much better than those
that don’t.” •