The Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Lebanon has seen better days. Elders might recall a time when the water was clear and teeming with color and life, but for the few last years, the waters have been practically devoid of life, and scuba diving more apocalyptic than fun. Until Dr. Michel Chalhoub, a Beirut-based engineer, [...]
Even if you didn’t give birth to the baby, you can still feed it to make it “yours” in Muslim communities. Here’s how. Under Islamic Sharia’a law, western adoption practices are frowned upon. When children are abandoned by their birth parents, they may become foster children of other families, but they are not allowed to [...]
Israeli street artist Nitzan Mintz writes her poems on the streets of Tel Aviv, using disregarded materials she collects from dumpsters and public spaces. “I use only recycled materials in my art,” she said.
Israeli archaeologists are baffled by a giant cone-shaped structure submerged beneath the waters of the Sea of Galilee. Twice the diameter of Stonehenge and weighing more than ten elephants, a mysterious cone-shaped structure on the bottom of the Sea of Galilee is challenging archaeologists to determine its purpose and age. The mound was first detected [...]
For ancient Egyptians blue was the color of rebirth. Today their chemical invention of artificial lapiz lazuli means new advances for lights, lasers and more. According to a new paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society the ancient pigment known as Egyptian blue may have important new applications in nanotechnology. Researchers at [...]
Irish artist David Thomas Smith weaves thousands of Google Maps screen grabs into intricate designs mimicking Persian rugs. Look closer, and these symmetrical compositions reveal global landscapes transformed by mankind. Imagine a carpet made up of aerial satellite images of modern infrastructure: concrete roads and rooftops replacing fiber weft and warp. See this artist’s “rug” [...]
This is not just “pretend.” Animal activists in Israel have started a movement where people are branded just like cows destined for slaughterhouse. Animal rights activism has taken a radical turn with a virulent new movement that has roots in Israel. Sasha Bojoor, 27, started 269life in order to create solidarity with a white calf [...]
Dubai is prone to frequent dust storms. A new solar panel dust particle remover made in Israel boosts power and cleans off dust at the same time Solar voltaic panels, which at their best only have about 25 percent efficiency for converting direct sunlight into electricity, have even less efficiency than this when dust and [...]
Finding building materials that are appropriate for hot desert conditions is one of the biggest challenges facing the Middle East and North Africa region’s construction industry. While earth used in architecture found in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere is typically considered the most effective material for keeping interior temperatures low while the sun acts like [...]
Saudi Arabia announced its Kingdom Tower, a skyscraper aiming for a new world height record of over 1 kilometer high in the sky. Boys, boys, boys, when will you learn that size doesn’t matter as much as performance? Next Azerbaijan broadcast plans to top that with their own mile-high cloud-puncher. Then Pakistan upstaged both with [...]
Can executions be green? Laurie answers this tongue in cheek. Tardy executioners have prompted Saudi Arabia to re-evaluate their centuries-old practice of public beheadings.The use of capital punishment in Saudi Arabia is based on a hardline interpretation of Sharia (Islamic) law. The practice attracts international scorn because of the wide array of crimes which garner [...]
Ahmed Abdel Azim and his team at Suez Canal University advance research in mycology (fungi) Its not the first time that Green Prophet covers stories on how Egyptian scientists are applying science to public policy. In 2011 Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad, winner of the European Union Contest for Young Scientists, found a new way of turning [...]
The Shams 1 Concentrated Solar Plant (CSP) in Abu Dhabi is the largest of its kind in the world and it has finally gone live. Green Prophet visited the 100MW plant in the western region of the United Arab Emirates earlier this year as part of a Masdar-sponsored media tour during the World Future Energy [...]
The European Commission (EC) approved a pork-based feedstock for farm-raised fish. Next year, your mullet and trout might contain chicken and pork. Horsemeat in burgers, meatballs and frozen lasagna is startling, but while these products include a “secret ingredient”, they remain as advertised: meat-based foods. But what happens when the fish on your dish also [...]
Making Ecocide a crime and legally punitive could be one way of getting corporations to respect the environment Unlike humans, nature does not have a voice. It cannot voice its concerns for being mistreated, overused and abused and it cannot stop the harm it often undergoes; however, this may change soon. In April 2010, Polly [...]
Clad in building-integrated photovoltaic panels and an aluminum skin that mimics the brain’s neural mapping Foster + Partners, the same UK architectural firm that created the zero-carbon city Masdar, is about to break ground on their first project in Israel – a solar-powered center for brain studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Working with [...]
UCLA and Egyptian scientist accidentally find a new way to bottle stored energy. This missing link for solar energy, hydro and electric cars could be a fast, tiny, biodegradable battery Penicillin, Teflon, microwave ovens and superglue were all discovered by accident. And now graphene super-capacitors might be the most important accidental discovery of our time [...]
As an avid tea drinker, I was intrigued when I stumbled upon a variety of sources that promoted the eco-friendly use of tea bags, outside the teacup. Arthur W. Pinero, an Englishman, of course, said, “Where there’s tea, there’s hope.” That’s definitely true. Brewed tea bags can provide a pick-me-up in ways you’d least expect. [...]
Didn’t Azerbaijan just claim to be building the world’s tallest tower? Abu Dhabi Group will construct the world’s tallest building in Pakistan. It’s the stuff of dreams. Let’s hope it stays that way. The project will surpass Dubai’s Burj Khalifa (the world’s tallest building in Dubai) as part of a $45 billion national investment by Pakistani [...]
Malina Suliman’s Fighting the Taliban with Paint and Graffiti Sometimes graffiti can be seen from space. In Tunisia it graces the country’s tallest minaret. In Lebanon, they are making green graffiti for the city streets. In another inspiring way, Afghan artist Malina Suliman finds inspiration in southern Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban and one [...]
An old Persian leopard has been captured on camera in Iran, but this is not the first time. The cat was first photographed by a camera trap in 2004, according to wildlife conservationists in the area, and has since been spotted by both game wardens and visitors on numerous occasions. In 2007, the Conservation of [...]
Farmers and consumers face a new kind of chemical terror: pesticides. Since it is very difficult to detect the presence of toxic chemicals in various crops, an Israeli organization has deployed a failsafe method to root out the threat using the same kind of equipment used by America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau [...]
Vernon Hugh Bowman, farmer vs Monsanto, billion dollar seed and biotech company. 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 [...]
Got the Foggiest Notion How to Drive in Desert Fog? Camel caravans and soaring sand dunes demand backdrops of sun-bleached skies (or star-strewn heavens). But what happens when the fog rolls in? Dense fog is a key feature of a desert environment, a natural result of rapid temperature swings. Topography also plays a role in fog [...]
Sound the alarms? Where has Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq’s underground freshwater sea gone? NASA’s imaging technology recently brought some bad news about Mideast air pollution. Now NASA brings more bad news about the Mideast water supply. We already knew that the Dead Sea is shrinking. Some people are even trying to do something about [...]
You can grow a living medicine chest in your garden with little effort. The old song says, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Let’s add echinacea, garlic and basil. Most are culinary herbs with poetic histories. All are green medicines that you can harvest at will. The herbs don’t take up much space, if not much [...]
If we hadn’t seen the footage, we would never have believed that Tel Aviv’s municipal workers would paint a fake handicap sign around a woman’s parked car in order to collect on the illegal parking and towing fines they then levied. Even worse, they believed they would get away with it. Unluckily for them, they [...]
A new bridge called ECOtainer made from recycled shipping containers will render “trash mountain” unrecognizable to residents of Tel Aviv. The Hiriya landfill just outside of Tel Aviv shut down in 1998 after becoming the repository for 25 million tons of waste. More mountain than landfill, Hiriya has since been transformed into one of the world’s [...]
R2D2 – Tunisia’s landscape and subterranean dwellings have made it ideal for filming our Star Wars movies! When the Star Wars films began they chose Turkey and its fairy chimneys for the futuristic backdrop of the science fiction films. Later films were shot in Tunisia and some fans have even gone so far as to [...]
Scarab beetles were sacred to the ancient Egyptians. These insects rolled balls of dung across the earth just as the sun god Ra rolled across the sky. Scarabs were seen as earthly manifestations of heavenly movement. A team of scientists from South Africa and Sweden recently published a study indicating that there was a grain of [...]
Just about everyone learned in their early geography classes that the Nile Valley was once a fertile haven. Crops proliferated on the green banks due to natural flooding that deposited rich nutrients, although occasionally these floods inundated and destroyed crops as well, and the land of the Pharaohs was a mecca for agriculture. But when [...]
It was about a decade in the making: without much fanfare the World Bank has released a report stating that the Dead Sea – Red Sea Canal project (also called the Red Dead Conduit) will work. The basic idea is to take salty water from the Red Sea, pump it up to a channel, desalinate it [...]
Green Prophet is on a VIP media tour in Abu Dhabi. We hope to meet Jordan’s beautiful Queen Rania; or at least catch a glimpse of her today as she pushes a sustainability message. Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan has a history of environmental stewardship. She will join French President François Hollande as keynote [...]
The year in retrospect has been a positive one. Despite civil unrest, dangerous regimes, and appalling environmental crimes and neglect, there are good green things afoot for the Middle East. Today we recap some of our green leaders of 2012, the people of the Middle East and for the Middle East who have made 2012, [...]
Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Myanmar and Yemen are still using leaded gasoline and many others have lead contaminated plumbing, soil, paint and household products. How can we reduce the world’s crime rate, particularly the rate of violent crime? When the crime rate rises or a horrific crime takes place, people are quick to find blame [...]
Can computer generated Bengal tigers help save the 1850 real ones which remain in the wild? The Life of Pi is a novel by Yann Martel, first published in 2001. It told the story of a boy whose family is shipwrecked while moving their private zoo’s animals from French India to Canada. It was thought [...]
It seems silly to perpetuate apocalyptic hype that NASA debunked eons ago, but as 2013 approaches, we are sensitive to a shift in global consciousness – something that spiritual leaders have long advocated as the necessary means to our survival. As the conversation about climate change and other environmental issues gains traction, it’s a good [...]
It’s za’atar season in the Middle East and though we don’t really need it, there’s another reason to love this versatile spice: it could be useful as an alternative to antibiotics. Both a perennial herb and a spice mixed with other ingredients, za’atar livens up a host of dishes throughout the Gulf, Levant and Mediterranean. [...]
There may have been a public battle to allow Saudi women to drive but an award-winning film explores the sensitive issue of women’s rights through a young girl and her green bike The battle for Saudi women to drive (and also take part in the Olympics) may have hit the headlines in 2012 but there [...]
The Gulf region is showing exactly why they are quickly becoming the top destination for renewable and clean technology in the world. A recent pilot project in Qatar aimed at growing cucumbers using seawater and solar power is just one of the more unique endeavors, and hopefully won’t have any Islamic leaders crying foul. According to [...]