Shlomi Mir is one of Israel’s most visionary designers whose recent tumbleweed anti-desertification project earned him a Lexus Design Award alongside giants like Toyo Ito. But its his beautiful rechargeable LED bowl lamp that we are drooling over today – an elegant combination of art, design, tradition, technology and even spirituality.
Turkey is floating plans to build a new “eco-city” in the southeastern corner of the country, near the border of Syria, and green building experts from Gaziantep want to use energy from burning pistachio shells to keep it running.
Until you have babies, the true awfulness of diapers doesn’t really set in. But ask the modern parent, who will buy up to 2,800 mostly non-biodegradable diapers in their baby’s first year. Then they will chuck most of them in the trash. Cine’al has at least one solution: hyper-absorbent diapers made with jellyfish.
StoreDot is the latest Israeli startup to wow the world with a groundbreaking new charger that takes a cell phone battery from 27 percent to 100 percent in 30 seconds flat.
Solar parks in the desert face two major challenges: a lot of dust on the photovoltaic panels and not enough water to clean them. Dust can cause up to a 40% decrease in efficiency of the panels. So there is huge interest to avert this problem. Normally teams of humans come in with squeegees to […]
More than 40 million people worldwide have been displaced from their homes and left to find shelter in strange lands. Maybe they find a tarp, or a tent, but their quality of life almost always remains dismal. To close this gap in need, Jordanian-Canadian architect and designer Abeer Seikaly designed a new kind of shelter. […]
Masdar has sued the Spanish government. The multi-pronged company funded in part by the government of Abu Dhabi helped build the world’s first 24/7 solar power plant in Spain, a feat made possible in part with subsidies. But Spain has now cut incentives for renewable energy, which eats into Masdar’s investment.
It has been a long, controversial and expensive road for BrightSource Energy, but their 392 megawatt concentrating solar plant is now finally delivering renewable energy to the California grid and it is the largest plant of its kind in the world.
Desertification has gobbled up huge swaths of the Middle East and North Africa, a fact that Jerusalem-based industrial designer Shlomi Mir knows all too well. So he designed Tumbleweed Desert – a rolling robot capable of spending many solitary years in the desert gathering data aimed at slowing encroaching deserts.
Solar ovens are great, and we’ve seen a lot of them. But they are limited since they only work when it’s actually sunny. Sun BD Group has bridged that shortfall with a new hybrid solar electric oven that can whip up a great meal at any time of day and under any conditions. When the […]
Masdar City is starting to shape up with a roster of new buildings. Siemens recently completed their LEED Platinum headquarters, the new IRENA headquarters is in progress, and GE just opened their first Ecomagination Center in the city’s first commercial building – the Incubator Building.
The world’s largest wind farm in the outer Thames estuary has the capacity to deliver power to 500,000 homes and offset 925,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere. NASA reveals photos of the London Array taken from space – seen after the jump.
In 2012, the world’s airlines transported three billion people, emitting 689 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. To mitigate the aviation industry’s future environmental impact, Boeing, Etihad Airways and the Masdar Institute of Technology are working on a groundbreaking new jet fuel made from desert plants fed with saltwater.
Can there be more Masdars? Can this experimental eco-city be replicated in other Middle Eastern or North African countries that don’t have Abu Dhabi’s immense oil wealth? Green Prophet put this question to Anthony Mallows, Director of Masdar City, and Chris Chi Lon Wan, City Design Manager, during a recent roundtable discussion.
The international renewable energy group IRENA announced the first six recipients of concessional loans for off grid renewable energy projects that are “ready for the shovel,” as Director General Adnan Z. Amin put it in a press conference yesterday. They will receive a combined $41 million from the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development (ADFD).