A newborn baby boy has died and his three-year-old brother is critically ill in hospital after they inhaled a toxic pesticide used in the apartment next door to his family’s home in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Police said the neighbour sprayed his flat with the banned bug-killer, which he was given by a friend, then […]
Dubai developers reach a new zenith in outrageous investment with just-announced plans to build a tropical rainforest on the desert outskirts of the city. The forest will exist within a climate-controlled dome as a key feature of a new luxury housing development. But the real news within this news is that local environmentalists are complaining, finally.
Mission Control for the Solar Impulse 2 is open for business, ready to guide the solar plane’s first flight around the world. Located in Monaco, the Mission Control Center (MCC) serves as project nerve-center, where a team of analysts and engineers will collect satellite-transmitted flight information to calculate and adjust the plane’s flight path. The plane will take off from […]
Why did the carrot slap the lettuce? Because it was too fresh. A joke that gains huge laughs in the single-digit age group gets a bit more foreboding when applied to grown-up concepts like world hunger and food security. An unprecedented amount of perishable food items are wasted every day in first-world cities. Now a new […]
Working out with no results? Health professionals in Dubai have a counter-intuitive solution to consider: eat more! So you’re trying to make good on your New Year’s resolution to put down the shawarma and pick up some weights. But after a month, you can’t see results (nor your toes). Fear not, the Dubai Health Authority (DHA) […]
Winter storms hammered much of the Middle East last week with strong winds that rose seas and dropped snow from Egypt all the way to Turkey. Meteorologists claimed it was the most severe December storm since 1953 to hit Israel, northern Lebanon’s roads were paralyzed, and the Sea of Galilee rose 10 centimeters in a day. But […]
The experimental flying lab better known as Solar Impulse 2 was launched today in Abu Dhabi. The groundbreaking airplane will circumnavigate the world flying both day and night without using a single drop of fossil fuel. Said co-pilot Betrand Piccard, “You can achieve miracles with renewable energy and clean technologies.”
An unnamed client hired London-based Baharash Architecture to design a luxury home that could fully function off the energy grid. That’s a tall order for any residence in Abu Dhabi, now consider the challenges for one sited in the punishing clime of the hyper-arid Liwa Desert where summer temperatures top 100°F. The star-shaped structure is modestly […]
Dubai Municipality has invited businesses and individuals to take part in its annual Car-Free Day on February 4 to lower city-wide vehicle emissions while commemorating the United Arab Emirates’s (UAE) National Environment Day. Last year, 7,000 employees from 65 government and private organizations participated. The bait they’ll use to incite more action this year? A chance to win another […]
DUBAI — Mention Dubai, and people immediately think of soaring skyscrapers, enormous shopping malls and insanely expensive sports cars. But 30 kilometers south of this world-class city-state — along the E66 highway towards Al Ain, and just past a Chuck-e-Cheese outlet — the glitz gives way to desert. Here at Umm Nahad, there are no […]
Engineers at Lockheed-Martin recently developed and patented a molecular filtration membrane called Perforene which can desalinate seawater using only 1/100th the energy of the best existing desalination systems. Perforene is made from graphene, the exciting new nanomaterial which comes in the form of one-atom thick sheets of carbon atoms. Like an overzealous nanotechnology, graphene seems […]
The Middle East and Africa subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation officially launched an outrageous shopping experience for its Xperia products this month, with a pop-up store located just offshore from the environmentally dubious World Islands in Dubai – and 4 meters under the sea. It’s the world’s first underwater store.
Luca Curci architects studio presents Desert City, a project proposal for a sustainable way to live in the desert. It surely beats the maze of crazy unsustainable cities we see in regions in the United Arab Emirates, save for Masdar the zero energy city outside Abu Dhabi. The architects say that their theoretical project was born from […]
Dubai Municipality teamed up with spice giant Eastern Masala and Jaleel Holdings to launch a new project that aims to pass on a message of healthy living, encouraging residents to create home gardens to grow vegetables, herbs and fruit.
WASHINGTON — Inhabitants of the oil-exporting sheikhdoms and emirates of the Persian Gulf wolf down an average 3,700 calories a day —leading to the highest rates of obesity on Earth — even as at least 805 million people, one-ninth of the world’s population, go hungry. Such huge disparities will ultimately lead to widespread unrest, warns […]