An 840 pound Saudi man died last week from complications associated with his weight and his passing is loudly being mourned online. Is it a sign of our digital times or a new awareness of the obesity epidemic in the Middle East?
Japan has won the bid to host the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo and Zaha Hadid has been picked to retrofit its National Stadium. First designed for the 1964 Summer Games, this new stadium boasts a few green credentials. Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid has never shown a great deal of interest in designing healthy green […]
Gulf countries like Abu Dhabi may lack freshwater resources, but they also have a lot of humidity. MIT’s new super efficient fog harvesting material could help countries with climates like this capture that moisture for drinking water.
Recognizing our likenesses even in superficial traditions can chip away at the sense of “otherness” that prevents connection. With Syria on the brink, will anyone dispute that the West and the Middle East need better connection?
By the time a patient notices the symptoms, treatment options against the progression of Parkinson’s is limited. While some of us might rather live on in ignorant bliss until the disease hits us in the face in older age, a new tool from the University of Haifa finds that with Parkinson’s, the writing is on […]
In London last week, a parabolic “death ray” of sunshine reflected off the city’s newest skyscraper burning cars and singing carpets in adjacent street level shops. It’s a cautionary tale for glass-clad towers in sun-intense Middle East, where robust assessment of a building’s impact on its environment is largely optional. This structure at 20 Fenchurch […]
In my last post I featured a photograph of an unused structure out in the desert near Dubai, a concrete amphitheatre. It turns out there was more to explore.
President of Portugal Aníbal Cavaco Silva and the Aga Khan presented this year’s Aga Khan Awards for Architecture at the Castle of São Jorge in Lisbon on Friday.
There is something so haunting about desert landscapes, and much as we love our own in the Middle East region, we are blown away by China’s desert scenes depicted through Shi Shaoping’s “The Eggs” art installation.
Agricultural scientist Tony Rinaudo is behind one of the world’s most successful reverse desertification projects – in Niger, and now he thinks a similar underground forest might exist in the Arabian desert outside of Dubai.
For outsiders, SIWA oasis in Egypt is a wonderful place to visit precisely because “civilization” has been so slow to arrive there. But for locals, the gift of a new 20MW solar energy plant will be received like a mountain of gold.
Severed goat heads, bloody and besieged by flies, lay side-by-side on a butcher’s slab. A dozen lethal serpents, coiled and poised to strike, wove back and forth before a snake charmer in the Marrakech souk.
Richard Branson’s recent commitment to this year’s Zayed Future Energy Prize jury speaks volumes not only about Abu Dhabi’s leadership in energy innovation, but also the faith world leaders place in the emirate’s (many) initiatives.
The Jewish New Year 5774 starts at sundown tonight, Wednesday September 4th, and ends on the night of Thursday the 5th. On the first night, families sit together and enjoy a meal rich in delicious symbolism, as we explained in this post. Carrots are a more interesting vegetable than one would suspect. They’re also one […]
A group of Afghan policemen have been arrested after one of them killed a group of six boys while fishing with a rocket-propelled grenade, the New York Times reports. Three of them were related to the mayor of Drumbak village, where the incident took place.