The 2012 summer Olympics are over but electric car marathons are beginning to heat up. Israel’s Better Place smashed the 24 hour distance record of 994.14 miles set last month by Renault’s Zoe. The new record was set with a Hoden Commodore. This is an Australian made electric car modified to use Better Place’s innovative […]
With a solar cooker, you can set a pot down outside and come back later to find lunch ready. We’ve only just begun harnessing the non-stop, 800 trillion-watt light bulbs’ worth of energy that sweeps our planet. The move towards solar energy is growing. In large areas of China, India, Africa, North America and the […]
Israeli solar thermal collectors made like honeycombs trap more heat from the sun to heat homes in cold countries like Germany. Israel is the land of milk and honey –– and solar hot water heaters. Practically every roof in Israel is fitted with a solar thermal collector to warm water for endless hot showers and […]
I considered myself an entrepreneur at the age of 15, when I set up shop on the cobblestone streets across my dad’s apartment on the island of Lefkada, Greece, to sell stones I collected from local beaches and then decorated. Although it was a great idea, and surprisingly lucrative, it probably wasn’t groundbreaking enough to […]
A fleet of fancy cars are gathering dust in the short-term parking lots at Abu Dhabi airport. The car parks, walking distance from the terminals, are meant for stays of three days or less. You pay dearly for convenient location, air conditioned walkways and covered car bays. That is, if you actually came back to […]
What’s hotter than Italian-designer Gabriel Diamanti talking about a solar-powered desalination device for the 99%? Not much, except for the Eliodomestico that he built during his graduate studies at the Milan Polytechnic in 2005. Following extensive travel to parts of the world that can no longer take fresh water supplies for granted, like Saudi Arabia, […]
It is very unusual to find a dinner or breakfast table in Israel that doesn’t include a smattering of meat and/or dairy products to choose from (depending on whether or not the family keeps kosher), which is why the revelation that tens of thousands of Israelis have embraced veganism in the last year is nothing […]
It’s summer’s final lap. The Olympics are over. The school year looms. So put down that beach book and take an end of season vacation to explore space, both inside your head and out of this universe. Do it now. You don’t have to move a muscle. This five minute clip’s been flying around the […]
Far from being Paris of the Middle East, traditional red tiled roof and sandstone houses suffocate inside the “other” vision of Beirut The Lebanese housing market is a bit of a strange phenomenon. A largely unregulated construction market coupled with grandiose projects from ambitious rich gulf state developers and Lebanese expatriates has created a surplus […]
Do tanks and wild flowers mix? Not according to Israel’s nature protection society. Israel Military Industries (IMI), which for years has had armament factories located close to dense population areas and as such has polluted area groundwater, is now on its way to exposing its environmental footprint even further. The organization is planning to build […]
On August 9th an electrical power outage hit people in parts of Cairo. This happened only ten days after India’s massive blackout grew to cover 22 northern states and impacted 600 million people. Both outages snarled traffic, stopped trains and turned off the lights for millions of people. But they also shared a common cause. When […]
Local press and environmentalists in Egypt claim that the unofficial garbage workers of Cairo – the Zabaleen – are being sidestepped by President Mohamed Morsi’s Clean Homeland campaign, which resolves to solve the country’s overwhelming garbage issue within 100 days. This was a dangerous promise to make given that so many of the systems required […]
Try something a little different than plain-old tomato sauce on your pasta. Try tahini! On my first night CouchSurfing in Haifa, Israel, in the cozy apartment of a young married couple, the three of us sat down, along with a local friend, at the table on the balcony to eat dinner – which, surprisingly, the […]
Israel’s Mediterranean city of Bat Yam is pulling itself out of obscurity with one of the most unusual art spaces we’ve seen. Located just south of Tel Aviv – the country’s most well-known seaside city, the Riviera used to be a thumping nightclub in the 1950s and 1960s. Now it’s a very yellow and open industrial-chic art […]
Rosé wine is gaining global popularity. Did you know that the Middle East with its long history of wine-making is producing some great rosés of its own? The summer heat is upon us and if you’ve been smart you’re perfecting those non-cook recipes to beat the heat. If you like a glass of wine here […]