Remember the story of the href=”http://www.greenprophet.com/2012/03/2000-year-old-date-pit-sprouts-in-israel/”>2,000 year-old date palm recently spouted in Israel? The invasive beetle, the red palm weevil, is slowly but steadily working its way across the region killing mighty date palm trees in its wake.

Pedestrians are being told to watch out for trees that could suddenly fall.

Imagine the Middle East without towering palm trees? It’s like Canada without the maple tree, or beer gardens in Europe without their horse chestnuts. But all these varieties trees are falling prey to invasive species who for lack of natural enemies are taking over new parts of the world.

In today’s local Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a newspaper report highlights the problem of the weevil, a small snout-nosed beetle killing date palms in Israel. They are yet to move in to Tel Aviv but most other major cities are now starting to deal with the problem.

In Haaretz:

“Date palms in cities throughout Israel have fallen prey to a beetle that eats away at the tree trunk and could cause them to fall over this summer, endangering pedestrians, the Agriculture Ministry has warned. The ministry called on the public to inform municipal authorities if they see trees that appear diseased so they can be treated before it is too late.”

The weevil is brown, 3.5 centimeters long and has a long snout.

In Saudi Arabia, there is a national campaign for control of the weevil by containing it, then destroying it using pesticides. Pheromone traps are also used there to control the thread of the beetle which emerges from the base of the tree, boring its way up through under the bark. Signs of infestation which can eventually topple the trees, can appear as a slightly bent and droopy crown hanging like a closed umbrella.

Already in 2006, the problem of the weevil was reported in Lebanon, and in 2008 the weevil was cited as a great danger in Abu Dhabi.

Las week Saudi Arabia claims that it now threatens 6 million trees in the country, and that a better framework for controlling it is needed badly.

The bugs started spreading in the 80s when it was accidentally introduced to the Middle East from Asia.

Obviously a smart biological control system that introduces natural prey to kill the beetles would be a desirable chemical-free way of solving the problem. Asian foresters may be able to come to the rescue. And if they find a solution maybe it can help make some Middle East peace. Just maybe.

Image via apajadore

The safety of the balloon industry is again questioned in the wake of a hot air balloon crash near Cappadocia, Turkey today that killed two, officials announced. Some 23 other tourists from Brazil, Spain and Argentina have been injured as the hot air balloon hit another’s basket mid-air while drifting over volcanic rock formations.

This is the second fatal incident for Turkey’s hot air balloon industry in the region – active for about 10 years. When I travelled to Cappadocia 14 years ago, there were no balloons for hire, at least none that I could see in sight.

Another major hot air balloon crash took place in Egypt this year when a hot air balloon caught fire, killing 19 tourists as it hit the ground.

Green Prophet’s Laurie was recently on a hot air balloon ride in Turkey, where she took some stunning photos.

Hot air ballooning is a gentle way to see our world’s beauty from above, but better safety standards might better be put into place to avoid more accidents as this mode of transport becomes more popular.

But let’s put the crash into proportion. Every day we hear of a bus crash, car accident or biking incident that kills tourists. 

In the recent Turkish accident most of the surviving victims suffered bone breaks. One witness E. Wayne Ross riding in another hot air balloon told CTV news that the crash happened early in the morning, as some 100 hot air balloons took off to the skies.

“We could hear the radio chatter and we knew something was happening. There was a frantic urgent transmission: ‘Release your parachute! Release your parachute!” said Ross, whose balloon was some 200 metres (yards) away from the vessel that crashed.

“It was probably some 300 metres in the air and it descended increasingly rapidly to the ground,” he said in a telephone interview. “There was a large tear in the fabric, probably some 10 to 15 metres long.”

After the crash he reported one person on the ground with others inside the basket as ambulances arrived to the scene. Before the crash his wife had told him that she thought the balloons were travelling too close to each other.

The owner of the hot air balloon company Anatolian Balloons said one of the victims died from a heart attack, and the second while being treated at hospital.

Above is illustration image of hot air ballooning over Cappadocia.

A business man in the Gaza Strip has found a lucrative way of satisfying the urge for KFC by smuggling it through underground tunnels. It may be four hours cold, with a side of soggy chips, but for Gazans it is a taste of freedom. Oprah might like to hear this news.

Green Prophet learns about the smuggling operation through a report in the New York Times. While we like to celebrate  positive eco movements that are coming to light under the difficult political situation there in Gaza –– slow food, growing food on rooftop gardens, reliance on home cooked meals (see this new Gazan cookbook) –– we also like to support food freedom and food choices, even if it means greasy, cold take-away.

When I was pregnant with my first child a couple of years ago I had a strange craving for Big Macs – without cheese. It was something to do with the secret sauce and the way it combined with the pickles and rehydrated onions that satisfied my urge. There was one week where I ate three of them to satisfy this shameful craving.

But urges in pregnant women should not be ignored. So I gave into it. Urges could be a sign of some important mineral or vitamin missing in one’s diet. I’ve even heard of strictly observant pregnant Jewish women being pardoned to eat non-kosher food combinations if her desire to eat this food is over-powering.

Over in the Gaza Strip most women (pregnant or not) have probably never tried a Big Mac (lucky for them probably) because you won’t find Western fast food chains setting up shop in a very unstable political environment.

A young entrepreneur Khalil Efrangi, 31, found a way around the blockade. According to the New York Times:

Formerly called Kentucky Fried Chicken, a KFC franchise opened in El Arish, just over Gaza’s southern border, in 2011, and in the West Bank city of Ramallah last year. That, along with ubiquitous television advertisements for KFC and other fast-food favorites, has given Gazans a hankering for Colonel Sanders’s secret recipe.

So after Mr. Efrangi brought some KFC back from El Arish for friends last month, he was flooded with requests. A new business was born.

“I accepted this challenge to prove that Gazans can be resilient despite the restrictions,” Mr. Efrangi said.

In the past few weeks, Mr. Efrangi has coordinated four deliveries totaling about 100 meals, making about $6 per meal in profit. He promotes the service on Yamama’s Facebook page, and whenever there is a critical mass of orders — usually 30 — he starts a complicated process of telephone calls, wire transfers and coordination with the Hamas government to get the chicken from there to here.

Religious Islamist governments don’t always see eye to eye with America and the ideals of the West. Fifteen years ago when I was in Syria, those same fast-food shops you could find in neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, Israel or Jordan were non-existant in Syria. Though Syrians craving a burger could get their fill eating a local variety, usually with odd names that vaguely sounded like the famous chains.

The flip side? Pirated versions of burgers and chicken we bet are less likely to contain industrial food additives like pink slime, meat glue, horse meat, or arsenic, which may be in KFC chicken.

Politics, ideology and healthy food choices aside, there are no Kentucky Fried Chicken chains in Gaza.  But smugglers have found a way to bring it through the illegal underground tunnels that link Gaza to a black economy in Egypt.

Most officials in Egypt turn a blind eye to the tunnels run by the Hamas Government. The tunnels offer an alternative to the Gazan blockade. Israel only allows certain necessary items through the land-based border crossing. While live animals, even lions and other zoo animals, complete cars in pieces, and sewage floods are making it through the tunnels, for about $27 Gazans can now get a taste of the west, and the Colonol’s secret blend of herbs.

::New York Times

Image via notionscapitol

Christian pilgrims to Israel may be thrilled to have a chance to bathe in the historic Jordan River, believed to be the original baptismal river of Jesus. It’s clean, safe and totally free.

Pilgrims arrive to the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee (where mysterious objects are still being found) at Yardanit, get off the bus and within a few hundred yards are themselves in the river in white robes.

I can understand the appeal but was put off by the whole idea that these pilgrims aren’t really baptizing in a river, but a standing pool created for tourism. The real river actually starts as a sewage pump outlet further downstream.

A series of dams on the Sea of Galilee block water from flowing to the River Jordan. The story is really sad. What ends up in the real “river” is effluent and all types of waste, and those brave souls who disregard the warning and dip into the water on the Jordan side far downstream are taking their lives into their hands.

By the time this wastewater flows down to its final destination it is merely a trickle of sewage, if it reaches the end at all.

This is what I learned a few years ago while on a Jordan River tour with the eco group Friends of the Earth Middle East. (That’s me above checking out the sewage pipe at the Jordan River’s source).

Local newspapers are now reporting that the Israeli Government along with various interest groups have decided to turn on a pump from the Sea of Galilee to restore the Jordan River’s native habitat. Some 1000 cubic meters of water will be pumped into the river every hour.

Recharging the Jordan River is a great idea our friends at Friends of the Earth maintain, but much more water will be necessary to bring it up to healthy levels, they assess.

They say that some 30 million cubic meters a year will not be enough to renew the Lower Jordan River. Something magnitudes bigger, 400 and 600 cubic meters would be needed for restoration, and Israel should allot 220 million cubic meters to do its part. It should be noted that the Jordan River is shared between three major stakeholders: Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. Peace making over a river important to all people is a very easy way to start real peace efforts on the ground.

Largely considered an environmental “extra” and a way to upgrade green building ratings, new research from Abu Dhabi suggests that building integrated photovoltaics are not just a green luxury item. The recent Middle East-based study found that governments and builders might consider the expense of building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) because in hot, sunny regions like the United Arab Emirates, these solar panels can slash energy costs by as much as 33 percent!

And while we root for local companies and suppliers, the best companies up for the challenge of lining the roofs, and sides of buildings with BIPV are companies from Europe, who have experience not only in choosy LEED-loving locations like London, but also with new clients in the Middle East.

The Austrian company ertex solartechnik is one of them. Dieter Moor, the CEO of ertex told Green Prophet (he is pictured below) that they recently completed a BIPV installation in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. The company installed 1030 efficient PV modules with an installed output of 149 kWp for the Sheik Zayad Learning Center at the Al Ain Zoo. The BIPV panels installed on the roof can be seen in the top image.

Dieter Moor walking “on” the roof of the Sheik Zayed Learning Center, inspecting the progress of the installation.

Moor tells us that the heat, the shape of the building and the immense amount of dust on the roof of this structure were challenges for his company to overcome when working with a Middle East client.

Of course creating a solution that needs to be shipped afar was also a challenge, but through working with a colleague who spoke the language and knows the culture, some of the obvious cultural barriers were overcome.

The project now complete and soon to be open to the public involved the redevelopment of the 40-year old Al Ain Zoo. The centre will be an exhibition and exploration of the natural and cultural history of the Arabian deserts, as well as deserts worldwide.

Knowing that dust cleaners would need to be a regular part of panel maintenance (cleaners would need to physically walk on them – could they employ monkeys to the job?), ertex custom-made panels with two layers of special tempered 2 mm glass, and strong enough to withstand 400 kilograms of weight –– which they tested in a lab using “human” boots.

As for the shape, non-functioning panels were put in places where part panels needed to be used.

Thanks in part to the ertex solution the Sheik Zayad building was recently awarded the Five Pearl Rating, the highest of the Estidama Pearl Rating System.

The Estidama system is the LEED for Gulf region countries.

Moor says that, “This building evaluation system is in principle comparable with the Austrian ÖGNI or German DGNB System and refers to the sustainability of the property.

Working with the company Enviromena, ertex had to work around a solution for a complicated building: “Everything was rounded,” Moor says, eventually finding a way to make rectangular panels fit into the undulating curves of the roof.

“Full coverage of the surface of the extraordinary building shape was possible and for architectural reasons, 121 special modules with a combined surface area of 1,140m² were manufactured. Due to the net energy production of circa 239,000kWh through the photovoltaic panels, the high sustainability rating can be maintained in the long run,” he tells us.

Surprise, surprise: lots of radiant sun isn’t always a bonus for BIPV: “High temperatures can have a negative effect on the solar cell semiconductors, making them less efficient,” Moor says.

So far ertex has clients around the globe from the UK (The Peak below was one of their projects), the US, Sudan and Turkmenistan to name a few. Their recently completed project in Abu Dhabi shows that they are ready to open their business doors to more Gulf countries looking to Estidama practices, and joining the global trend of environmental sustainability in buildings.

ertex installs BIPV at The Peak in London. Even odd-shaped PV panels were built to collect power. 

When price is no limit, why not?

ertex installs about 1.1 MW of energy per year, and while “most of our customers don’t care about the return on investment, it´s more a discussion about esthetically integration of PV,” says Moor, money put in on energy saved can be about 20 years.

Efficiency and electricity drops over time, so this is obviously an estimate, Moor, a married father of three, adds.

::ertex

Soon to market his clean-tech product through two major manufacturers in Europe, Shaltiel says his new e-shower invention doesn’t only help hotel owners improve their bottom line while guests are washing theirs. It also helps quell the risk of Legionnaire’s disease, and offers a greener way to get clean.

In essence, SmarTap gives new meaning to the expression “power shower.”

Shaltiel explains: “My sister gave birth to twins and I noticed all the complicated logistics of taking care of them. The temperature had to be just right. So this idea of creating a smart shower device is because of my sister. I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to turn on the shower and automatically fill the babies’ tub with 20 liters [five gallons] of water at 37 degrees C [98.6 F] exactly?”

Instead of using a thermometer and having to guess, Shaltiel’s sister could just press a preset button and the bath would be exactly right for her twins. “That’s how I began the company,” the father of a six-year-old tells ISRAEL21c.

Shaltiel was an engineer from Intel where he helped design Sandy Bridge microprocessors. He linked up with an engineering partner, and since the end of 2009 has enlisted several other former co-workers to build his clean-tech company.

Funded by the Jerusalem-based Terra Venture Partners, SmarTap’s six employees are building the company as an OEM (original equipment manufacturer). They aim to get their smart shower engine box at the heart of chain hotels via manufacturing partners.

They also plan to win over consumers with the shower device, expected to cost about $500.

The SmarTap engine, which can control temperature and flow rate, and prevent scalding, does not need to sit beside the shower. Rather, the showerhead is fitted with a Wi-Fi communication device, and this pairs with a digital control to transmit information back to the showerhead brains in another location.

From the digital controller, one can program the ultimate shower experience or easily adjust flow and temperature. For hotel owners, the programmability of the SmarTap solution lets a resource manager reduce flow rate during peak demand, or use it to save several liters of water every minute.

“If the flow was reduced from 20 liters a minute to 17 or 18, the person taking a shower wouldn’t notice,” says Shaltiel.

But the accounts manager would. For hotel chains, Shaltiel can assure a return on investment (ROI) from one to three years depending on how the system is fitted. If it’s to replace worn-out equipment or installed at the beginning of construction, the ROI is one year. The cost to replace a well-functioning system would yield an ROI of three years, Shaltiel estimates. After that, the savings starts.

By June he hopes to have real data from a pilot program at two Tel Aviv hotels, the Dan Panorama and the David Intercontinental. About six showers in each hotel will be fitted with the SmarTap e-shower device for patrons to try.

If you do try it, take note: The shower might start “dry” at first. It doesn’t actually heat water but diverts cold water to a holding tank until the temperature is just right. Then the flow begins.

A shower in the clouds?

Connected to the Internet cloud, suddenly a resources manager can see the whole picture of peak shower time when most of the guests arrive to their room. It’s like spying, but in an ethical way.

SmarTap founder Asaf Shaltiel is breaking into the clean-tech market.
“We’ve embedded Wi-Fi in each unit, which registers with a router which gets data from the cloud,” says Shaltiel. “We can augment pressure and temperature and change it, and do what is called ‘peak shaving’ in the hotel industry. For instance, we can make sure the pressure doesn’t go over 18 liters a minute. We can also ‘tell’ the boilers to work harder, and so on.”

An additional benefit for hotel owners, he says, is that SmarTap saves them on monthly cleanings to prevent Legionnaire’s disease. SmarTap can self-clean using a pulse of water about 158 degrees F, when the room is unoccupied.

When a guest is in the room, the showerhead will be programmed never to go above scalding temperature. While it might irritate businesspeople accustomed to steaming their suits in the bathroom, this can prevent second-degree burns and make the shower safer.

For the home user, preventing burns in children –– or parents from a blast of hot water when someone flushes the toilet –– can be a lifesaver too.

SmarTap might also be a lifesaver for new moms as they struggle to hold and calm baby while getting that bath just right. As the kids grow, SmarTap can be a teaching tool about how much water goes into a shower or bath, and how much that costs.

SmarTap plans to launch products through German and Italian companies. Europeans will be able to buy a SmarTap system by the fourth quarter this year, and Americans a little while later.

This story is reprinted from ISRAEL21c – www.israel21c.org

Keeping human development in check along the Mediterranean isn’t only a goal for environmentalists, she says. Already back in 2004 the United Nations penned directives and policies on how coastal development in the Med region should look. And most of the countries in the region signed on.

An urban land-use and policy expert at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Alterman initiated Mare Nostrum, a new project that will unite 11 Mediterranean countries and stakeholders in finding ways to better enforce shoreline development regulations.

Back in Roman times, the Mediterranean was nicknamed Mare Nostrum, Latin for “Our Sea.” And indeed the Romans celebrated it as their own by building amphitheatres on its shores to provide entertainment venues for the empire’s port cities, which stretched as far as Israel and Egypt.

The Israeli Mare Nostrum project will link modern partners with modern needs and problems. It will serve as a legal bridge between all the Mediterranean nations, starting first with a handful of partners. Mare Nostrum has been awarded a grant of €4.3 million and will take place over three years.

She ‘sells’ seashore laws

“My idea was unique in the field, and rather than offering to look again at what should be the best laws of how to manage the coastlines,” Alterman tells ISRAEL21c, “the devil is in the details and the problem is getting the [existing] laws implemented.”

The legally binding treaty that most of the Mediterranean countries signed is called the Integrated Coastal Zone Management Protocol of the Barcelona Convention. Among its directives is that development should be set back 100 meters from shore. The EU now wants full enforcement and coordination between ministerial offices and databanks.

However, “the distance between lofty declarations and what’s on the ground gets messy. There are major disparities between countries in the Med,” says Alterman.

“My strategy is to look from the bottom up rather than the top down,” she says. “I am not looking at the best practices, but the baseline practices. We’ll look at the lowest baseline for each country and inch it up a bit, notch by notch from the bottom.”

Some 30 partners and advisers from countries including Greece, Malta, Italy, Jordan, Germany, Turkey and Spain met in Haifa recently to determine the biggest issues facing “their sea,” ascertaining that uncontrolled development is the biggest problem for coastline protection.

Haifa is a beautiful port city north of Tel Aviv but it has been polluted from tankers and industry on its shores. This city, as well as several others in the Med region including Kavala, Greece, will be case studies for how Alterman’s modern-day Mare Nostrum will be put into action.

Alterman tells ISRAEL21c that she plans with her partners to build a toolbox to help local enforcement agencies do their job, but also help them find a middle ground with property owners who want to build on the coast, or with those who have done so already. Compensation could be part of the middle ground, she says.

Mare Nostrum meeting participants

She says it’s necessary and meaningful for Mare Nostrum leaders to engage the public and local NGOs by creating an activist spirit. Using mapping technologies like GIS (geographic information system), they can show physical sites of uncontrolled development, and the pristine areas that need to be saved for the future. With maps and coordinates in hand, and knowing what’s at stake, local groups and individuals can better petition to save their coastlines.

Israel has one of the densest countries in the region and offers only 2.5 centimeters of coastline per citizen. This is one reason why the country was a very early adopter and implementer of coastline development laws well before the UN created its regional protocol in 2004. Israel’s laws are pretty well developed, and except for France perhaps, quite possibly the most developed in the Med region, says Alterman, who is considered a world expert in her field.

Over the next three years, Mare Nostrum partners will assess progress in several case-study cities. These results will be brought to the table in another few years to see if Mare Nostrum will indeed be a successful vehicle for saving Our Sea.

This is reprinted from ISRAEL21c – www.israel21c.org

Israel is a world leader in wastewater reuse for agriculture, and in developing water- and energy-saving technologies locally and abroad. But Israel has new challenges to confront: a growing build-up of pharmaceuticals in its waterways, plus poorly processed wastewater from the Palestinian Authority-administered territories mixed into its water table.

These issues are being addressed in a new cooperative project between Israeli and Palestinian researchers. The French drug company Sanofi is sponsoring the research and will supply the source material, while the Peres Center for Peace will manage the logistics.

Scientists and graduate students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are being matched with Arab peers at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem to study the effect of pharmaceutical residues in water and how compounds from Sanofi might help. Their insights could be applied to local and global water problems.

The heart of the problem is that all the drugs we take end up down the toilet some way or another. And residues from birth control pills, estrogen and water pills, anti-depression medications, even ibuprofen, can remain after the water is treated. When all that water goes back to the farmland to grow tomatoes, or seeps into the water table, it can compound and concentrate — causing considerable biological damage to humans and ecosystems.

Beyond the meat they eat

Hormone-treated beef is recognized as a source of certain health problems in the United States. But though Israelis are not large consumers of red meat, health authorities are seeing a surprising increase in testicular cancer among Israeli men and a decreased age of first menstruation in girls.

Could the problem be in the water?

Researchers worldwide agree that pharmaceutical residues in the water can have striking effects on fish, causing some species to change their gender. Their effects on humans are not as well known.

The new Israel-Palestinian project aims to study samples of local water and find the best ways to filter out or deactivate classes of drugs like these so they do not go back to nature, or us. Some of the pharmaceuticals under study are diazepam, aldactone (a diuretic), ibuprofen, ketoprofen and iopromide.

Israelis do have a leg up on potential new technologies for treating drugs in water, such as advanced filtration membranes. In their approach, Al Quds University scientists are going to apply activated carbon, or a novel clay-based micelle technology, to see how effective these can be in removing pre-defined chemical compounds from water. The project is to begin this summer.

If the researchers are successful, Sanofi may develop the technologies into a commercial project, says Hannah Bardin, a soil and water expert working for the Peres Center for Peace. She is managing this two-year project from the Jaffa-based center named after Israel’s President Shimon Peres, an avid environmentalist.

The center has experience and an interest in development type projects and how engineering can be used to address social change and underprivileged communities,” she tells ISRAEL21c.

In a past joint research project between the two communities, senior scientists looked at salinity in water, while this one will feature the younger generation of master’s level students, Bardin says, likening the study to a peace project.

“We are trying to create a community of water researchers working together and visiting each other’s facilities. In this framework, we will have on-campus visits and annual meetings where they will present results,” Bardin says.

She anticipates that the labs at the Technion and Al Quds will use different techniques. “The idea is that there is very little monitoring. We want to find out how to treat and remove all these materials that end up in the drinking water.”

Meanwhile, in an unrelated project, Ben-Gurion University’s Prof. Alon Tal will be working with Israelis and Palestinians to determine what kind of compounds are found in the region’s water and waterways from a bottom-up approach, funded with a half a million dollars from USAID’s Middle East Regional Cooperation (MERC) Program.

This report is republished from ISRAEL21c – www.israel21c.org

Human development has put this blind shrimp, or prawn to be more precise (Typhlocaris Galilea), at severe risk of extinction.

The prawn is found in a remarkable habitat: It lives in one chamber of an ancient Roman cistern in a forgotten city on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. Water from the chamber doesn’t flow in or out directly, but seeps through the clay bottom, and then into other sections.

There are others similar to these blind shrimp in cave systems around the world, including Mexico, but these shellfish “are really the last on earth,” says Nicole Wexler, development director for the Tisch Family Zoological Gardens, also known as the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo.

Habitat threatened as groundwater use changes

Described first in 1909, the blind prawns are now critically endangered because the only place they can live is in the En-Nur pool, where groundwater drilling and pumping has leaked foreign water into their environment, changing the composition and temperature.

The three-inch-long, transparent creatures aren’t especially cute.

The three-inch-long, transparent creatures may not be especially cute, nor do ecosystems depend on their survival. But the Israel Nature and Parks Authority approached the zoo to help keep the species alive through a dedicated behind-the-scenes breeding program.

This “genetic bank” — an ark of sorts, Wexler tells ISRAEL21c – is a little windowless hut to limit the prawns’ exposure to light, and the water is carefully balanced with just the right amount of salinity and dissolved gases they need in order to thrive. Someday they may be able to be returned to their native habitat.

“One of the functions of a modern zoo is to act as a genetic ark for critically endangered species — particularly where their natural environment is disappearing – to ensure that they do not become lost to us forever,” said Shai Doron, director of the Biblical Zoo.

Animals from Persia and Arab countries fill the ark

There are many other breeding and conservation efforts at the Jerusalem zoo. Zoologists there have done remarkable work with Persian fallow deer, believed to be extinct until the 1950s when a few were found in Iran and brought to Israel to be bred. Also once native to Israel, the deer decades later are now back in the wild in the north of Israel and in the Jerusalem hills.

The European otter, also a threatened species, has been bred successfully at the zoo as well as the sand cat, the Negev tortoise and the Griffon vulture, says Wexler.

The zoo was also the first in the world to breed captive Asian elephants using artificial insemination.

Recently, Israel’s nature authority and zoos have had to deal with an influx of gray wolves entering Israel from the north. It appears the animals are fleeing troubles in surrounding Arab countries, such as Lebanon.

“It’s so endangered and hunted so that’s why we are seeing an influx into Israel,” says Wexler.

Wolves, among them the gray wolves, will be part of a new exhibit opening at the zoo in the spring in June. “It will be stocked with wolves rescued from the wild and in time they will breed and then we’ll see what we can do for them next.”

Wexler argues that only zoos can accomplish this species rescue work.

“Today the world’s natural habitats are so threatened that without zoos these animals aren’t going to be preserved,” Wexler says. “We participate in both local and global programs to save animals and it’s important work as a whole.”

This story is reprinted from ISRAEL21c - www.israel21c.org

The Israeli EV company Better Place hasn’t been having an easy ride. Despite nearly a billion dollars in investment Better Place has failed to really convince the Israeli public that a swappable electric battery is the way to go.

Its partner car and battery builder Renault have also lost the faith in Better Place – a company that once had missionary powers in the Israeli investment community: EV World is reporting that Renault has ditched future plans to make any new models for the swappable Better Place styled electric car, and will focus on fixed, rechargeable lithium batteries instead. The Fluence ZE model will still be an offering, but new buyers or leasers of the Better Place electric cars in Israel should not expect any new car model soon. (In my opinion the Fluence ZE is a boring way to show off a new concept car.)

The final nail in the coffin for Better Place?

“When you look at the overall trends, we must conclude that replaceable batteries are no longer the main track for electric vehicles. The main track is flat batteries in cars with charging. We believe that people want flexibility in the technology, and we can see that the demand is for rechargeable standard batteries,” said Carlos Ghosn the chairman of Renault.

Maybe you saw the wonderful movie, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Or maybe you’d read stories on Green Prophet about Masdar, or Shams, the world’s largest CSP plant in Abu Dhabi. Arab nations and their economies are certainly not all about oil and natural gas these days, and in fact these nations are becoming leaders in amazing projects in renewable energy. Now in the news: Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates has just announced the creation of an $850 million incinerator plant which will take garbage from the city and “burn” it into green fuel. 

The new plant is to be built at the Mussaffah Sea Port, according to The National, and is being commissioned by the Abu Dhabi National Energy Company. Suppliers and supporters start your business tender engines!

Figures estimate that a million metric tonnes of municipal solid waste (MSW) will be burned every year, to produce 100 megawatts of energy, that’s the same amount of power as the world’s largest CSP plant, Shams which also opened in March in Abu Dhabi.

The National Energy company which goes by the abbreviation TAQA will be looking for builders and operators, and to have the plant ready by 2016 or 2017. It is expected to run for at least 40 years.

Saif Al Sayari, executive officer and head of TAQA’s energy solutions division said: “The waste for our plant in Abu Dhabi will come from various collection points in the emirate of Abu Dhabi and will be diverted from landfill at Al Dhafra.”

Emirates Rail, the national railway of the region may be used to divert some of the waste. And waste will include solid residential as well as commercial and industrial.

Waste heat will generate steam to drive a turbine to produce green electricity.

“It is not too different to what we do at our other eight thermal power plants in the UAE, which all burn natural gas,” Al Sayari noted.

New technologies have produced better filters for removing contaminants that would otherwise enter the air. “The emissions will fall well within globally recognised guidelines, such as the Waste Incineration Directive, applicable to all European plants, of which there are hundreds,” Al Sayari noted.

According to estimates the 100 MW plant will prevent more than a million tonnes of CO2 or carbon dioxide from entering the air. Carbon dioxide is used to quantify all types of greenhouse gas including methane. Greenhouse gas emissions are what’s causing global warming and a forecasted radical climate change.

The plan here isn’t just to burn everything in sight, but to use the incinerator as a last stop for all waste that cannot be sorted and recycled. The City of Abu Dhabi currently produces about 5,000 tonnes of waste per day. The new plant will consume about half of that. A small pilot will be built on Delma Island before the larger plant goes into operation.

Meanwhile in other good news, Westin Abu Dhabi is turning food waste from its golf resort into fertilizer, and the city of Abu Dhabi’s area farms (yes there are farms in the desert!) is converting farm waste into compost.

::The National

Image via serdal

While it’s rare to find sharks in the Mediterranean Sea (they are almost extinct), they are not so uncommon in the Red Sea. Its warm waters and ample food source bait sharks who sometimes get personal with bathers and divers. In 2010, a Red Sea white tip shark ate an elderly tourist and just this weekend, a Red Sea shark visited an Eilat, Israel beach, getting within feet of swimmers. There was no mention in media reports if it was a gentle whale shark or a white tip, but in any case no damage was done.

While frightening, most sharks do not attack people. Usually it’s the other way around in Egypt, where diving conservationists are fighting to stop illegal shark hunting. Arab Spring uprisings may have been liberating for the people, in some sense, but these protests and the results have been a failure for sharks. While each shark in the wild fetches about $200,000 a year for the tourism industry (based on its value in creating ecosystem diversity), if sold on the black market for meat, it gets a a quick $150 to $200 bucks.

According to the UPI, Egypt authorities are going to start a probe on illegal shark hunting in Sinai. With all that authority is worth in Sinai in preventing kidnappings, and violence, we doubt to see any results soon.

The marine conservation group Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association in Sinai (one of its researchers is a Green Prophet hero for 2012!), Egypt is working to fight against shark hunters who advertise hunting expeditions for tourists, and who also sell their catch on tourist beaches for dinner.

“HEPCA and the Red Sea community are outraged at the disturbing news coming out of the Suez Governorate; the recurring slaughter of the gentle and endangered whale shark,” a release from the organization said.

It’s likely that the rare shark sighting in Israel at the top of the Red Sea where it meets Sinai, Israel and Jordan, was forced to come there to escape hunting pressures.

Arab Spring violence in Lebanon and Syria, and increased hunting, I was told by Nicole Wexler, an authority at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, has led to an unprecedented number of wolves seeking refuge in Israel from Syria and Lebanon. Most people don’t distinguish them from dogs, which is a good thing for humans with killer instincts.

Woman with whale shark from Shutterstock

It is scandalous when people buy something and then are lied to and given another product. But I am not surprised over the horsemeat headlines in Europe and North America: people have become too far removed from what they eat.

As a former horsemeat eater, it’s no big deal to hear the news that there is horsemeat in Swedish meatballs. But I do blame consumers for the scandal: When you go to the grocery store you see plainly that the amount of packaged food far outweighs fresh produce, deli items and basic things like cheese. Don’t you see that this is something wrong?

Most of the packaged and frozen food at the grocery store are just things you can make yourself.

Who needs a dozen kinds of pretzels, one hundred or more kinds of cereals, a hundred kids of bread, fifty kinds of granola bars? Hundred and hundreds of packaged and bottled sauces, isles and isles of frozen foods?

Years ago when I was a kid the only kind of frozen dinner you could buy was a TV dinner or fish sticks. And that for my parents was something we reserved for when they were going out for the night.

Now frozen dinners have become the norm. They have swapped places with regular home cooked meals. This means our families are getting poorer quality food, with important local ingredients gone –– including the most important one, love, missing.

Instead of preparing food, everything has become easy: buy some pre-made cookie mix or partially baked bread. Pop it in the oven and voila – a homecooked meal.

I think if I were going to be in an uproar over the horsemeat scandal I’d be adding to the list all the different kinds of chemicals and additives that make their way into our food as well.

My solution: people should become more religious about their food.

If you look at religious groups, let’s say the Jews, they are constantly scanning, checking, and monitoring their meat sources.

Kosher beef comes from kosher animals that have no wounds, and which are in sound health. They are slaughtered in a very specific way, and the blood from the animal is drained. Jews are constantly checking what’s in their food on religious grounds. Jews cannot for instance eat milk and meat together in any circumstance, except perhaps for medical reasons.

There is no better example of stringency towards food in the Jewish community as now, during the days before Passover when a whole pile of food laws and regulations come into effect. Thanks to the old story of escaping slavery in Egypt, and not having enough time to leaven their bread, Jews do not eat leavened bread on Passover. They are even forbidden from seeing it.

Religious Jews in Israel have now gone so far as to get one of their main water sources from the Sea of Galilee cut off during Passover. The argument goes that if someone drops a piece of bread into the lake during Passover, the entire public’s drinking water will be contaminated –– even if in homeopathic amounts.

This idea hasn’t extended to the amount of chemicals Jews are allowed in their food, but a religious or halachic approach to cleaning and organizing food is a good model on how we can treat that which goes into our homes and bodies.

The most devout Jews will eat meat from slaughterers and butchers who they know. I have friends whose parents have never eaten at a restaurant, even extremely religiously supervised ones. They won’t eat in them because they don’t trust the source of the food.

For this reason my husband’s Jewish grandmother would make her own kosher wine every year for Passover. Also in Islam, and Hinduism, we find societies of people that care about what goes into and what doesn’t go into their food.

Now you, whether you have moral, health, or ecological reasons –– take a look at religion to see how food is handled and consumed. With more interest in food traditions you might find fewer surprises waiting for you at the supermarket.

Making food at home is something you can engage your kids in before it’s too late. Before they are lost forever in their video games and smart phones. Forget blaming the government and the stores and the suppliers for horsemeat and prepare your own healthy food at home.

If you want to know exactly where your meat is coming from, go to a farm and buy a whole animal that can then be packaged and stored in your freezer. Or hunt. This is what men do in Northern Ontario. They organize hunts and then divvy up the moose and dear meat. It’s a great staple in cash-strapped communities.

Be outraged over the horsemeat scandal. But do something about it. Be more religious in your own way about your meat. Skip the frozen food isle and head to the meat counter. Ask where your meat comes from. Get it ground in front of eyes. Prepare food and freeze it yourself so you can still enjoy those quickie meals midweek and stop freaking out about what’s being put into your food, as if you have no say in the matter.

Image of meat scandal from Shutterstock

Liquid algae may taste like sushi which is unknown in poor parts of Africa, but it is easy to grow with basic equipment like old plastic bottles, and it is packed full of protein – a veritable superfood. Just ask the Japanese who consume algae and algae derivatives as a way of life. Now, kids from an Israeli highschool are perfecting an algae growing system started in Kibbutz Ein Shemer (and which we reported on here) so that algae farms can made in communities in Africa to wipe out malnutrition in areas where desertification claims land and livestock. The local Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the project will be multiplied by ten and replicated at Jewish and Arab highschools in the region.

According to Haaretz pupils at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium are working on a growth system for Spirulina, an algae that’s been dubbed the “superfood” because it contains 70% protein.

Algae isn’t filling the stomach, but at least it’s nutritious, say the students growing the algae medium in old plastic soda bottles (see more on the original algae project here). Aerating the mixture with a bubbler, it prevents the need for them to take the bottles home and shake them by hand – as algae needs ample sunlight, and carbon dioxide to grow.

The kids’ project is so promising that UNESCO, Rotary International, and international education organizations and dozens of African schools are interested to know more about how it’s done.

The pupils are working on a system so that it can be done in areas in Africa where food is scarce. The algae, which is a plant-based micro-organism, and the slime you find on the inside of your swimming pool, could potentially feed millions of people. (This article here suggests that eating algae is what has made Homo sapiens human).

To grow the project the kids have set up an NGO called Algeed. Soon they will replicate the project in other schools and within a year hope to take their bottles and bubblers to the world market.

Image from the Kibbutz Ein Shemer algae project

Overseers include Boris Zlotnikov who has a Spirulina farm in the Negev and Yaron Yehoshua, who is the founder of the Algae Biotechnology Center at Bar-Ilan University. Both volunteer to help out the kids.

“We still have a series of experiments in front of us: Temperature differences, different concentrations of the food that’s the basis for the algae, [amounts of] light and different growing methods − in plastic bags, for instance,” Yehoshua says.

At the end of the process, he says, “We’ll reach the optimal growing conditions and build a model that will increase the protein concentration in the algae.”

Israel has a pile of algae companies that are trying to grow the green stuff as a biofuel stock and for the nutraceutical and fish farming market. I’ve personally interviewed most of them (like Isaac Berzin), including leaders at research universities. If a little more professional guidance and investment is put into this project it could very well change the face of hunger.

::Haaretz (subscription may be required to access article)

Unleash your inner Thoreau, show the human side of sustainability and and win $10,000 for a creative nonfiction essay.

Have you been lucky enough to Dance at the Dead Sea but then couldn’t help but notice its destruction? Or you’ve have had the rare chance to travel and surf through unknown parts of Iran. Perhaps you are just a wanderer or quiet philosopher type who has a rare knack for seeing natural detail the rest of us miss. If you have a “green” eye, a corresponding “green” pen, and an ecologically-minded story to tell or have told you can submit it to a new contest for sustainability writing and win a cool $10,000.

Creative Nonfiction magazine with the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives at Arizona State University are looking for the best creative nonfiction essay on sustainability. The winning essay which will take home the prize will also be published in the magazine’s special ”Human Face of Sustainability” issue.

The magazine and the Sustainability Solutions Fair, one of the programs within the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives at Arizona U, launched this competition to grow the conversion on sustainability within the individual as a writer, and to enlarge the conversation about sustainability as a whole around the planet.

“As we face daily reminders of environmental challenges across the globe, our work here is to advance knowledge about the existing and potential solutions of sustainability, so we’re thrilled to be partnering with Creative Nonfiction to raise awareness and thoughtful responses to these issues that affect every one of us,” says Patricia Reiter, director of the sustainability programs at Arizona University.

Before you sharpen your pencils, we suggest reading a great primer: American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. I’ve been reading this book edited by Bill McKibben over the last year and it gives the best lessons on how to write on sustainability issues that are in line with the times. It inspires.

And you also have to know the basic entry requirements for the contest: According to the contest rules your entries should be personal essays or stories that illuminate and present the human side of environmental, economic, ethical, and/or social challenges related to the state of the planet and our future. They need to be true stories, backed up with facts and research if possible.

From the editor’s desk: “We seek essays on topics that range from global to local, from “big” (e.g., Resilience after natural disasters; New technology solutions vs. common sense; Energy harvesting) to “small” (e.g., Personal decisions about consumption; Reuse, recycle, up-cycle, bicycle?; Green, clean—what does it mean?; What can we learn from past generations?). Whatever the subject, we want to hear about it in an essay that blends facts and research with narrative—employing scenes, descriptions, etc.

“Your essay can channel Henry David Thoreau or Henry Ford, Rachel Carson or (a literary) Rush Limbaugh; but all essays must tell true stories and be factual and scientifically accurate,” editors note.

Creative Nonfiction founder and editor Lee Gutkind points out: ”There are so many with an interest or stake in this timely and important issue: including nonfiction writers, environmentalists, engineers, and scientists. I’m eager to read through these submissions and see how a diversity of voices are exploring and contextualizing their ideas through narrative.”

In addition to the $10,000 prize, the winner will be invited to attend a special launch event hosted by Arizona University’s Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives. With a contest deadline at May 31 this year there is a little less than three months to get your work submitted.

An additional prize will go to an artist who is selected to illustrate the issue, so forward this call-out to your designer friends as well. Designers can win $3,500 but more importantly perhaps, have their work featured on the magazine’s website and inside the special edition on sustainability. Anything suited to a print format will be considered.

Complete submission guidelines are available at the Creation Nonfiction website here

Top image of girl and typewriter from Shutterstock

Besides the really terrible ew factor, the consequences for the environment are as equally yuck: the Egyptian army is looking to stall and stop Gazan smugglers from digging tunnels from the Gaza Strip to Egypt’s Sinai have found a new and dirty way to flush out smugglers: they are pouring raw sewage into the underground tunnels. Leaders in Gaza are trying to figure out how this tactic bodes for future relations with the Islamic leaders in Egypt.

For the Palestinian smugglers, the tunnels are the only free-market lifeline to the outside world. Through the tunnels, important commodities otherwise unavailable in Gaza are smuggled through –- including live animals, some fit for the badly managed Gaza zoo, like lions. The smugglers have also known to smuggle in car parts later assembled into complete cars on the other side of the tunnel. But generally food, cement and other building materials are smuggled through since borders between Egypt and Gaza, and Israel and Gaza have been restricted and tightly monitored.

Wastewater has already caused death to tunnellers in Gaza.

But to make peace accords stick between Israel and Egypt, Egypt’s new government has no choice but to enforce the borders between Gaza and Egypt-controlled Sinai. The tunnels are not only used for goods into Gaza, they are used to transport weapons.

According to the NY Times “concern in Cairo about the tunnels spiked last August, when 16 Egyptian soldiers died in a militant attack on a military outpost in Sinai. The Egyptian government believes the attackers came through the tunnels.”

In the past Egypt flooded the tunnels with gas, something which was easily pumped out with clean air. The raw sewage appears to be a more effective, if not offensive, way of stopping the smugglers.

“Palestinians say that so far the flooding has hurt individual livelihoods but not the total volume of goods moving below ground. On Wednesday, about two cargo trucks per minute were pulling out of the main smuggling zone inside Gaza, laden with cement, gravel, canned food, citrus and vegetables. Hamas customs officers kept a record of each truck and load,” reports the New York Times.

Meanwhile the workers in the hundreds of tunnels that exist linking the borders are working hard to pull out the sewage. We can’t imagine what this does to the moral and health of the people in Gaza, but we do hope that peaceful and quiet times are ahead so that sewage can be channels to its rightful place.

Above image via the NYTimes

It sounds like something from a book about the perils of the future, a future that is strangely today reality: The seed-engineering company Monsanto genetically engineers seeds to have desirable traits that make them hearty or the plants resistant to the effects of herbicides like Roundup. But when farmers buy and use these seeds they must sign away rights to use the seeds of future generations. After all, Monsanto is investing in the biotechnology (the company reasons) and it needs to ensure future business for its investment.

Holding back the use of one’s self-made seeds sounds almost as bizarre as bottled air in the Lorax, or the bottling of water. But in the case of water, bottled O2 and seeds: these things do happen in our polluted world.

Environmentalists typically are against the practices of Monsanto, claiming that there are certain inalienable rights people and farmers have when they buy seeds. Some farmers in Egypt have resisted Monsanto’s GM maize, while a new company from Israel called Morflora claims to have a new way of washing seeds to avoid Monsanto’s ethical problems altogether. But farmers need to think about their future, and profits. They buy Monsanto seeds because in some markets it is the only way to stay relevant.

So far Monsanto has been a winner in cases against farmers it has taken to court who have gone against the company’s terms, recounts a recent story in the New York Times. Now an American farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman, from Indiana has gone against Monsanto by using soy seeds produced by his crop. The trick: he bought his own seeds back from a grain elevator which sells the seeds for animal food.

According to the Times article: “the 75-year-old farmer from southwestern Indiana will face off Tuesday against the world’s largest seed company, Monsanto, in a Supreme Court case that could have a huge impact on the future of genetically modified crops, and also affect other fields from medical research to software.”

Bowman pleads that he honored Monsanto’s agreement and didn’t use the seeds from his harvest and noted that the contract he signed didn’t make provisions for him buying the same seeds back from another party. He told the NYT that he didn’t want to pay Monsanto huge sums of money for their soy seeds because he planted his crop late in the season, after the wheat harvest, and that it was bound to fail.

He lost to a district court hearing in 2007, and had to pay Monsanto more than $80,000 for infringing on patents owned by the company.

But now Bowman who is planning to fight till the end says, “I was prepared to let them run over me, but I wasn’t getting out of the road.”

Once the beans are sold to the grain elevator, Bowman claims that Monsanto has no more rights to them. And this is what he is bringing with him to court.

He is being helped by lawyers working pro bono.

The question about patenting living organisms has long been considered immoral, but it is the only legal tool in place that can support and grow the biotechnology industry, proponents for the industry argue.

Sources say that any Supreme Court ruling on this new case could have monumental impacts on the biotechnology industry.

I have to note that the seeds in question are ones Monsanto produces to make crops tolerant to Roundup (a Monsanto product ), a strong herbicide that kills weeds but not the crop. Roundup has also been linked to birth defects and God knows what else. Were more farmers to return to permaculture methods of farming, ones that use organic-friendly and natural pesticides, and sometimes heirloom seeds, all this business of Monsanto would be irrelevant.

Yet when I say this people I know who argue for genetic engineering they say GMOs are the only choice for feeding a hungry world. What do you say?

Image of  Vernon Hugh Bowman via the NYT

When I lived on a roof in Tel Aviv with my boyfriend Elad more than a decade ago, I would spend some evenings watching the Cypress trees sway and pray in the wind, and above them flocks of starlings painting the sky with their moves like tea leaves in a cup. Without a television it was the perfect form of entertainment. But unless you had your head angled straight up to the sky, you’d miss them.

Earlier this month a large flock of Starlings decided to give a show of a lifetime to a dozen or so families in the Negev Desert, Israel. Birds in the desert are easier to see: As the sun sets the birds in this 8-minute video start to get trickier and trickier with their coordinated air show, or aerial antics. According to Israel Forever this is the first time these Starlings have appeared in the desert for the last 20 years.

“The common starling, first sighted last year at Kibbutz Ein Gev on the eastern shore of the Kinneret, used to fly to Israel from Russia and Eastern Europe until about 20 years ago in mind-boggling flocks numbering some 15 million. But for unknown reasons, the population declined to about a tenth of its former size, and for that reason is no longer seen in Israel.

“But now that their numbers are climbing back, they can now be sighted again in Israel, particularly at dusk when the flocks begin their spectacular aerobatic display before retiring for the night,” the website reports.

Watch the video. It builds to a crescendo by minute 8. They say God is in the details. But obviously, also in the birds.

Agassi’s idea was to push electric cars into the market by providing quick switch electric batteries and switch stations so that electric car drivers could overcome range anxiety. Electric cars can only drive so far before they need a recharge which can take hours. Dozens of these switch stations are now built in Israel.

But after the firing of Agassi last year, Better Place could no longer hide its financial troubles. Despite hundreds of millions in investment, the company was not able to get its car on the road. Only several hundred were sold in Israel as the public was slow to pick up on the idea that seemed to be more costly than driving a petrol-fueled car. This was something Better Place had promised would not happen once they made their cars marketable.

Forbes had an email exchange with Susanne Tolstrup, Better Place’s director of communications. She said: “In the short term, the company will focus its energy and resources on its two core markets, Israel and Denmark.”

From the Palo Alto office John Proctor wrote: “We plan an orderly wind-down to fulfill all our commitments, so it may take some time.”

Israel and Denmark, two small “island” countries are considered the perfect launch spots for Better Place cars. Now Israel has offered an attractive leasing program for about $500 a month, including charge which has attracted about 100 buyers in January.

To date some $850 million in backing money has gone into Better Place from companies like General Electric, Morgan Stanley, HSBC and Israel Corp. Operations have been in Australia, Canada, China, Hawaii and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Since its inception the company has lost more than $500 million. The company has not been able to secure buyers despite the millions it has poured into marketing the idea. The company even built an education and test drive center north of Tel Aviv which has attracted celebrities and hordes of Israeli tourists eager to get their shot and brag rights about testing the Israeli-conceived electric car which has actually been built by Renault. It’s a service to the environment but other electric car projects like the Twizy might reap the rewards.

With interest in French cars sagging in recent years, perhaps Better Place could have been in a better place if it had struck a deal with a German brand like BMW or Volkswagon? Israelis pay a lot of money for cars anyway because of the 100 percent import tax. Those buying a luxury brand (which the Better Place car is to some extent) expect some sort of wow factor from the car they drive. The Renault does not offer that appeal. It looks like a mom and pop car.

If anything Better Place has set a good example that new startups can avoid. Read this Smartcompany story on tips that newcomers can glean.

Still I have faith that large Israeli companies will look into adding Better Place cars into their leasing fleet. This is one way the public can overcome the pollution caused by an overabundance of cheaply leased cars in Israel, with some programs offering unlimited fill-ups.

Are you one of those people who slather sunscreen all over your face come high noon, but remove the T- shirt later in the day to catch those warming, vitamin D-making rays? Well if you are one of those people (which was me until I read this study)  who take joy in basking in the “safe” late day sun drinking a beer or sailing your sailboat, be warned: according to a relatively recent study published in PNAS (links to PDF), afternoon sun ups your risk of getting skin cancer five fold.

And it’s not because of anything the sun did: according to the researchers it’s all about our internal circadian clocks and our DNA’s ability to fend off the damaging effects of UV radiation. It turns out that our DNA is less protected to mutations late in the day. Simply put: our body works less good after a long day on the job. The bad news: more DNA damage is found to occur. This damage can result in skin cancer.

Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States and statistics in sunny countries, especially in the Middle East, see similar numbers. The main cause of skin cancer is DNA damage caused by the UV component of sunlight.

In humans and mice, the researchers led by Dr. Aziz Sancar (inset), a professor of biochemistry at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, found that mice exposed to UV radiation (UVR) at 4:00 AM display a decreased latency and about a fivefold increased multiplicity of skin cancer (invasive squamous cell carcinoma) than mice exposed to UVR at 4:00 PM.

“We conclude that time of day of exposure to UVR is a contributing factor to its carcinogenicity in mice, and possibly in humans,” the write.

They add: “With these considerations, then, we suspect that by restricting UVR exposure to morning hours would reduce the risk of skin cancer in humans. This recommendation, however, must be considered provisional until actual DNA repair rates are measured in the skin of human volunteers.”

Our basic advice is this: wear a hat and long sleeves and pants when you can (long protective fashion is the fashion in the Middle East for a reason!), and wear sunscreen.

There are all kinds of natural sunblocks to choose from, and Karen provides a DIY organic sunscreen recipe to make your own, one without all the parabens and yucky chemicals in the commercial long-shelf life brands. If you have kids, make it with them and teach them the dangers of sun exposure at the same time.

Whether you live in a sunny country or are visiting one this winter, love the sun, but stay safe.

Image of drinking beer in the sun from Shutterstock