At a bargain basement price tag of only $450,000 the Israeli startup Gnrgy has bought the assets of the failed electric car company Better Place. Will the third time be the charm? Two other companies have tried to buy Better Place but failed. Gnrgy makes the most sense so far.
Gnrgy Buys Better Place for the Price of an Apartment in Tel Aviv
Bees Trained to Detect Cancer and TB on Human Breath
It turns out that bees are not only essential to global food production, they also make amazing sniffer “dogs.” Which is how Portuguese designer Susana Soares is able to train Apis mellifera to detect cancer and tuberculosis on human breath.
Arab Restaurant Offers 50% Discount When Cell Phone Is Off
An Arab-owned restaurant in Abu Ghosh, Israel has come up with a brilliant new Slow Food marketing campaign that may get people eating better: restaurant owner Jawdat Ibrahim has promised a whopping 50 percent off your bill if you turn your cell phone off when dining.
Ibrahim, 49, owner of the restaurant called Abu Ghosh, tells AP that smartphones have really destroyed the modern way people are eating. An over the top and generous discount may sway people back to a more serene period of life when people came to his restaurant to eat, not to talk on the phone, text or surf while dining.
He told AP: “I’m changing something. It might be something small, but maybe in some small way I’ll be changing the culture of eating,” said Ibrahim, pictured above with satellite dish full of hummous.
Ibrahim’s restaurant in Abu Ghosh is a pillar of co-existence, drawing both Arabs and Jews to come to dine together in the Arabic village. He is no stranger to publicity. We interviewed him in the recent past when in 2010 he helped Israel earn the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest plate of hummous. The four ton meal was served on a satellite dish. And the record was fleeting.
Some say that Ibrahim is in a good position to be able to offer deep discounts: in the 1980s he won $23 million in an Illinois State lottery in the United States, and used some of the money to start up his successful restaurant which is located about six miles from Jerusalem.
This new stunt to offer discounts to people who turn off the phone should also be applied to people who can finish their meals at the restaurant – a place which serves hearty meals with meat and hummous, salads and the like. It’s a place where eyes are often bigger than the belly and where the staff like to spoil guests.
The Israeli society at large is trying to shake up prices in food items – a trend which started a few summers ago with tent protests around the country. A new chain on the market called Cofix is attempting to upstage Israeli coffee chains by charging about $1.25 for a cappuccino which costs about $3 or $4 at your every day cafe.
Solar Energy Women Wanted East!
Women in the Middle East are being encouraged to take up a career in renewable energy, thanks to a new initiative. The Women in Solar Initiative is aimed at engaging more women into roles within engineering, as significant growth and change takes place within the sector.
Oil-Rich Qatar Takes Eco Expertise to Philadelphia’s Famous Greenbuild
The Qatar Foundation is distinguishing itself as a leader at Greenbuild, the world’s largest gathering of green building pioneers in Philadelphia, where Hilary Clinton will deliver the 2013 keynote address tomorrow.
Obamacare: Amman, Jordan Style
Green Prophets burn lots of calories trying to make the planet a better place, but you can’t do much do-gooding if you’re dead. I’ll share a day in my week as a cautionary tale (and offer a peek into Amman’s excellent, and sometimes culturally surreal, medical system).
Better Place Investor Michael Granoff To Write Tell All Book
With almost a billion in financing and electric battery charge and change stations in place nationwide, at its critical hour Israel’s electric car company Better Place failed. It went bankrupt this year. One of its first investors, and biggest backers Michael Granoff will be writing a tell-all book. He speaks with Green Prophet.
Garden of Eden’s Mesopotamian Marshlands in Iraq May Get An Eco Uplift
Middle East architects Raya Ani and Zayad Motlib first told us about their plans for Mesopotamian Marshlands ecosystem and community earlier this year, and now they’re presenting their ideas to the first AIA Middle East conference in Dubai.
Tunisia’s Mohammad Ali Is Transgender Against Muslim’s Societal Odds
Tunisian female footballer Fatima Maleh announced on national radio that she is now a man, legally registered in civil records as Mohammad Ali. One not-small step for this man; and a giant leap for Tunisia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community.
5 Steps to a Carbon Neutral World Cup in Qatar
Qatar has promised a carbon neutral 2022 World Cup, but we know from the Masdar City experiment how hard that is to achieve. Still, here are five dubious steps AECOM and Zaha Hadid Architects are reported to be taking to support that goal with their joint design – Al-Wakrah Stadium.
5 ways to lighten knee skin naturally
5 Ways devoted Muslimahs can eco-lighten dark prayer-knees
Kneecaps darkened by repetitive prayer in a kneeling position just ain’t pretty. Even if your gams aren’t publicly paraded, it’s not a look most of us want to achieve. You can slather on harsh chemical bleaching creams, but how about trying an eco-remedy instead?
Islam requires followers to pray five times daily. The ritual involves kneeling on a prayer mat and touching the ground with your forehead. Done vigorously over time, a dark “prayer bump” may develop smack in the middle of the brow. This patch of calloused skin, called a zebiba, is considered by some as a sign of religious dedication.
Muslimahs also pray, but few women end up with a prayer bump. A woman likely takes better care of her facial skin than a man does, and if she chooses to wear a hijab her forehead is further protected from contact with abrasive prayer mat fibers.
Do fervent women get a “mark of faith” elsewhere on their bodies?
Performed prostrate on hard surfaces, frequent prayer can be brutal on knee joints, and on the papery skin that covers them. Clothing may protect skin from embedded dust, but it will still bruise and callous from repetitive kneeling. And to makes matters worse, melanin-rich ethnicities are prone to dark patches caused by the slightest friction or hormonal imbalance.
5 ways to even patches of dark skin caused by praying
Exfoliate
Exfoliate skin regularly to get rid of dead skin cells, one of the main causes of darkening skin.(Just check that your chosen product doesn’t include pollution-causing plastic microbeads!
Clean with lemon juice
Lemon juice contains natural bleaching properties. Dip a cottonball in fresh lemon juice and rub it gently on the knees. Allow the juice to stay on the skin for at least 15 to 20 minutes, then rinse. Repeat several times a day.
Hydrogen peroxide
Hydrogen peroxide has excellent bleaching properties too. Dip a cottonball in hydrogen peroxide and apply it to the knees. Repeat several times daily.
Aloe vera
Aloe also works well to remove dark spots. Pull a frond off an aloe plant, open up the leaf and rub the gelatinous inside over the affected areas daily. Let dry completely, then rinse.
Moisturize but check blood sugar
And do check your blood-sugar levels next time you visit your doctor. Dark spots, including zebiba, can be a type of acanthosis nigricans which could be a sign of insulin resistance caused by type 2 diabetes.
What is Acanthosis nigricans is a real condition
Acanthosis nigricans (AN) is a skin condition that causes one or more areas of skin to darken and thicken. Often the skin with AN feels like velvet. People who get this skin condition sometimes mistakenly believe that a dye or something else they touched has discolored their skin. They try scrubbing away the discoloration. Vigorous scrubbing will not get rid of AN.
Sometimes, it is a warning sign of a health problem that requires medical attention. For this reason, it is important to see a dermatologist if you notice an area of darker, thicker skin.
What is a zebiba?
A prayer callus, zabiba or zebiba (Arabic: زبيبة zabība, “raisin”) is a callus on the forehead present in some devout praying Muslims, mainly in Egypt.
Israel’s Mapal Promotes Peace by Treating Palestinian Sewage
Finding a solution to the problem of raw sewage reclamation in rural Palestinian communities continues to be an ongoing issue. A new peace project between an Israeli treatment company Mapal Green Energy and the Palestinian Authority could sweeten tensions behind a stinky problem.
Religions Sign On to Save the River Jordan
Our favorite peace-water NGO Friends of the Earth Middle East have just held a conference in Jordan last week and there had faith leaders sign the “Covenant for the Jordan River” to save the Jordan River.
Hawa Akkar Wind Farm to Illuminate 60,000 Lebanese Homes in First for Country
Lebanese renewable energy have fallen short of its ambitious goal of reaching 12 percent of Lebanon’s energy needs by the year 2020. But now it is in the middle of building its first wind farm at about 60 MW in the country’s north.