Are grandma’s heirloom tomatoes Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO)? What about Lebanese cucumbers or the maize that Native Americans transformed from a meager ankle-high grass into long-eared mazes of golden corn? What is so scary about GMO?
China’s economy is growing exponentially. So is the needs of its population. To keep ahead of the food curve, China’s Yuanda Group just bought the Israeli company AutoAgronom for $20 million.
Despite Israel’s dead electric car company Better Place and its venture to create an electric alternative to fossil fuel driven cars, the Israeli government is still interested in weaning most of its cars and other vehicles away from oil by the year 2025. With hanging Skypod’s in the wing, here’s the plan.
Talk about being self-sufficient, but totally weird! Israeli student designer Naomi Kizhner has designed a collection of jewelry that harvests energy from veins in the human body. The project highlights in a beautiful and artful way how humanity is addicted to energy consumption. It may be a thought experiment more than anything, but these jewels provoke […]
The ever increasing amount of space junk makes it dangerous to pass through Earth’s orbit. Space junk can intercept and hit satellites throwing them out of orbit. But wayward satellites still able to perform may get a tow back to position thanks to a new Israeli startup. Need a lift?
Most Gulf countries import up to 90 percent of their food, which neither bodes well for food security no climate change – since the food that is brought in from Europe and elsewhere has a lot of what are called “food miles.” True to their name, Forward Thinking Architecture proposes a solar-powered hydroponic food belt as […]
Apart from a couple of monkeys from Iran, the Middle East has yet to send a serious mission to space. But Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the UAE vice president and ruler of Dubai, recently confirmed that this is about to change with news that the United Arab Emirates is planning to send a […]
Saudi Arabia is a desert country with no freshwater resources. Every day the Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) produces more than three million cubic meters a day of potable water, which requires a great deal of precious energy, so every drop must be conserved. Cue NOMADD.
I get that a lot of people don’t have any experience growing food and that city people might not have garden space, but so called high tech gardening has gone one step too far with Click & Grow’s exorbitantly expensive “smart herb garden.”
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, a story pops up about donkeys in Turkey that carry solar panels so that shepherds, who are often out in the field alone for days at a time, have enough energy to power their laptops.
Green walls and rooftop gardens are great, but keeping them healthy in the Middle East and North Africa can be challenging. Green Studios, whose work in Lebanon we’ve featured once before, has an answer with their patented technology that ensures plants can flourish despite the extraordinary heat in our region. “We wanted to develop something that is […]
“Drones are the future of conservation,” said Dr. Shaikha Salem Al Dhaheri when commenting on his team’s plan to use drones to monitor flocks of flamingos at the Al Wathba Wetland Reserve in United Arab Emirates.Dr. Al Dhaheri is executive director of Terrestrial and Marine Biodiversity at the Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi (EAD.) He […]
Ocean acidification has reached record levels, so the deep-pocketed Board of XPRIZE are at it again – using “incentivization” to spark technological breakthroughs to “benefit humanity”. They’re holding out a pair of $1 million carrots to tempt everyone to conjure up a better sensor to measure ocean acidification – a malady caused by our continual […]
The world’s third largest producer of aluminum has teamed up with Israel’s Phinergy to produce a new battery that would make electric vehicles as cost effective as gas- or diesel-fueled vehicles and significantly extends vehicle range.
Israeli start-up Sensibo is convinced it can uptick your air conditioner’s IQ. They’ve created a mobile app (with associated hardware) that allows you to control your air conditioner (AC) from anywhere.
Following the news that 3D printed homes from China can be built in 24 hours, comes a new Israeli invention called SmartBrick.
Turkish archaeologists have unearthed what Discovery News calls the ‘Byzantine iPad.” Dated to the 9th century A.D., the wooden tool was found among a shipyard of roughly 37 ancient ships in Istanbul. The original ‘iPad’ measures roughly seven inches, except it’s thicker and made of wood, and comprises five overlaid carved rectangular panels coated with wax, Discovery reports. “Yenikapı is a phenomenon with its 37 […]
This is one for the kids to answer at dinnertime: An octopus’s arms are covered in hundreds of suckers that will stick to just about anything, with one important exception: those suckers generally won’t grab onto the octopus itself. If they did, the flexible animals would quickly find themselves all tangled up.
You might not want to tell your Moroccan grandmother, but technology first developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) that recycles urine and waste water is being implemented to provide clean drinking water for 1,200 university students.
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 […]
Posterity may end up migrating from place to place to find food like our nomadic ancestors did if we don’t get a hold of desertification and climate change. To make that easier for desert dwellers, Stephane Malka and Yachar Bouhaya propose the Green Machine – a massive city on tank treads that fertilizes the Sahara […]
Some countries like Canada are trying to say goodbye to human-delivered postal mail forever. But a new initiative from the United Arab Emirates puts a little 21st Century technology into the old mail carrier.
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.
Israel’s do-it-yourself (and environmentally friendly) soft drink maker SodaStream may go down in the record books as having created the most provocative Super Bowl commercial that never aired on TV, but it’s having a hell of an afterlife on YouTube, racking up over 11 million views since its Monday release.
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.
