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What Can Rio+20 Do For The Arab World?

Arwa Aburawa
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What Can Rio+20 Do For The Arab World?

rio brazil sculptureWe speak to Mohamed Abdel Raouf, a green researcher who will be attending the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) about what it could do for the Arab world

According to the latest reporting, the preparatory talks ahead of the Rio+20 summit have been inconclusive and raised real concerns that the conference will be a complete failure. Many delegates are frustrated at the lack of progress made around the global plan of action, entitled The Future We Want, which they hope world leaders will sign up to in Brazil in June. But Mohamed Abdel Raouf, remains hopeful that some progress will be made and also wants to encourage the Arab world to take a stronger position in favour of a Green Economy.

An independent environmental researcher, Abdel Raouf insists that “even if there is just tiny progress at Rio+20, it will be better than nothing” and it’s only through small steps that big progress can be achieved. The Rio+20 summit will be a follow-up to the landmark 1992 Earth summit in Brazil, at which international treaties to tackle climate change and conserve the Earth’s diversity of plants, animals, and other life forms were agreed.

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Israeli Military Uses Biomimicry to Design Butterfly Drone

Tafline Laylin
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Israeli Military Uses Biomimicry to Design Butterfly Drone

cleantech, science, biomimicry, military, Israel, butterfly drone

Biomimicry is one of the smartest contemporary approaches to design, so it was inevitable that Israeli researchers would apply this science to their military designs. Like the Iranian home that mimics a snail’s form in order to stay cool and a bottle inspired by the Namib desert beetle that can harvest water in one of the driest places on earth, Israel Aerospace Industries’ (AIA) latest insect drone, their smallest to date at only 20 grams, takes its intelligence, form and other properties from one of nature’s finest creatures: the butterfly.

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A P­erfect Beach Holiday at Green Papaya in Thailand

Karin Kloosterman
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A P­erfect Beach Holiday at Green Papaya in Thailand

green papaya thailand pool haad salad

Even Green Prophets need to get out of the Middle East once and a while. Although you can find the world’s most perfect sand and beaches on the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea in Sinai, or pristine beaches in the Gulf, sometimes we just want something a little different. This February we took one of our beach holidays to Thailand for a month. As best as we could we looked around for resorts that catered to the green traveler and found a few that fit our fancy. We’ve already featured our slow boat ride from Bangkok, and the luxurious hotels on Koh Kamui like Zazen. After leaving Samui, we decided to go to the quieter island of Koh Phangan. Note to readers: Phangan is only quiet a week before or after a full moon party. So plan a trip around the full moon if you want to avoid the crowds. My parents love to party so they took off to the full moon while we chilled back at the resort.

Getting to Green Papaya is a bit of adventure. And that’s what makes it extra fun. Once you are there, tucked away on a secluded beach, you can be almost sure that most full moon partiers won’t find you except for the occasional one that gets shipwrecked or lost.

After an hour drive from Hadran Beach (Full Moon Party Headquarters) we wound up a dirt road to be greeted by the Green Papaya sign. Since traveling to Thailand, I’d be promising my mom an Avatar experience, sites with lush green vegetation, overgrown flowers, butterflies galore, and Green Papaya helped me fulfill the promise. 

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Loch Ness, Whale Placenta? A Lava Lamp? Mysterious Deep Sea Creature from UK is Revealed

Linda Pappagallo
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Loch Ness, Whale Placenta? A Lava Lamp? Mysterious Deep Sea Creature from UK is Revealed

deep sea creature Deepstaria EnigmaticaIt’s called Deepstaria Enigmatica, but what is it?

A very cool video of a mysterious creature filmed during deep-sea drilling 5000 feet below sea level near the United Kingdom on April 25, has created much clamor amongst scientists. Theories about the species of this animal ranged from a jellyfish to an unknown marine version of the Loch Ness monster to a whale placenta. Mind you, a new undiscovered species would also be a likely conclusion- especially given that ocean depths remain one of the least explored and understood places, in fact we know more about the moon than our own oceans. Click below to see the video and to find out what it is.

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Could America’s 250 Percent Tariff on Chinese PVs Help the Mideast?

Brian Nitz
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Could America’s 250 Percent Tariff on Chinese PVs Help the Mideast?

yen china solar panels

The United States Department of Commerce ruled yesterday that Chinese photovoltaic panel prices were below production costs and therefore their sale constituted dumping.   Proposed antidumping tariffs ranged from 31 percent to 250% and would come into force sometime after October 2012.  The tariff is expected to significantly increase the cost of solar installations in the US.  This ruling was widely praised by struggling US photovoltaic manufacturers, several of which are on the brink of bankruptcy as solar panel prices dropped below $1 per watt.  Others, such as Tom Gutierrez, chief executive officer of GT Advanced Technologies Inc. (GTAT) have a different view.  In a recent interview he said, “The war we are fighting is a technology war.  If we get stuck protecting low level assembly jobs, we lose on the future.”

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Venus to Cross Mideast Sunrise on June 6, 2012

Brian Nitz
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Venus to Cross Mideast Sunrise on June 6, 2012

sunspot venus sun middle eastThere’ll be a little black spot on the Sun today… (in June). Watch out for Venus come sunrise.

A rare transit of Venus will be visible at local sunrise throughout the Mideast on the morning of  Wednesday June 6, 2012.   A transit occurs when one celestial body passes in front of another from an observer’s point of view. A solar eclipse is a kind of transit. The most familiar kind of transit is a solar eclipse, where the moon– or much more frequently, a portion of the moon, transits the sun.  Several solar eclipses can occur with in a year, but total solar eclipses are much rarer (and from personal experience, much more beautiful!)  Because totality can only be seen from a narrow strip of land, 50 to 100 miles across, each location on earth sees a total solar eclipse only about once every 300 years.  Parts of the Mideast witnessed a total solar eclipse in 1999 and 2006 (I saw the 2006 one from southern Turkey.)  The next solar eclipse in the Mideast wont arrive until August 2, 2027. But there’s always Venus.

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Maurice Sendak Sails Off for Night and Day

Faisal O'Keefe
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Maurice Sendak Sails Off for Night and Day

where the wild things are max monsters book illustration

Jewish American writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak died last week, at age 83. 

The acclaimed master of kid-lit once said, “I don’t write for children. I write. And someone says, ‘That’s for children.'” Best known for his 1963 book Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak spoke through guileless prose and vivid imagery. Simple messages beautifully imagined: the essence of all his works. His books seem variations on a theme. Characters transcend negative feelings of rage, jealousy and envy; they experience change; and ultimately, they survive. Think Dostoyevsky, but with better pictures.

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Banded Israeli Bird Suspected of Espionage in Turkey

Julia Harte
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Banded Israeli Bird Suspected of Espionage in Turkey

A bird-brained theory: Turkish farmers suspect a European bee-eater found in their fields of spying for Israel. 

When a farmer in Gaziantep province in southeastern Turkey came across a dead bird in his field several days ago, he thought nothing of it — until he noticed a band around its leg, reading “Israel Tel Aviv”, and that its “nostrils were very different from other birds’, and very wide.”

The local police station was alerted, and a police intelligence force has taken the bird away for inspection, according to Habertürk.

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Street Art Meets Castro Fashion in Shipping Containers

Tafline Laylin
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Street Art Meets Castro Fashion in Shipping Containers

urban art, shipping containers, recycled materials, Castro, O*GE

After a full year of planning, O*GE’s hard curatorial work at the Castro street art project in Jaffa has finally paid off. In one of the most surprising marriages of fashion, design and urban art we’ve seen to date, the Israeli-based clothing company invited more than a dozen internationally-acclaimed street artists to work with their fashion designers to create a fascinating summer collection.

But there’s more. In order to provide a showcase of both the street art and clothing, O*GE designed a pop-up shop made of shipping containers, which is currently on show at Hangar 2 at Jaffa Port just south of Tel Aviv, and the graffiti artists are manifesting scaled versions of their work that has been immortalized on t-shirts sold at Castro stores around the world.

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Mysterious cascade creature spotted in the deep oceans

Linda Pappagallo
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Mysterious cascade creature spotted in the deep oceans

A mysterious strange creature, baptised “cascade creature” has been allegedly filmed during deep-sea drilling 5000 feet below sea level near the United Kingdom on April 25.

Theories about the species of this animal ranged from a jellyfish to an unknown marine version of the Loch Ness monster to a whale placenta. But a new undiscovered species was also a likely conclusion- especially given that ocean depths remain one of the least explored and understood places, in fact we know more about the moon than our own oceans.

Experts like Southern Cross University marine biology lecturer Dr. Daniel Bucher, believed that the creature resembled “a very unusual shape deep sea jellyfish”, the sex organs gave it away he said:

“In last the 30 seconds or so you start to see more of the structure, these pendulous tubes with four or five whitish structures and some branching between them, which look to me like the gonads of a jellyfish”.Others believed that the creature was a Stygiomedusa Gigantea jellyfish which can grow up to six meters in length and has only been spotted 114 times in 110 years.

But alas the verdict has been finally reached after a month of internet discussions , the species is in fact a (collapsed ) Deepstaria Enigmatica, a rare jellyfish species that resembles a translucent satin sheet or “lava lamp”.

This species was first captured on camera in 1967 (below) and described similarly to the species caught in the video.

Getting Personal With 94 Elements – from Hydrogen to Plutonium (Video)

Tafline Laylin
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Getting Personal With 94 Elements – from Hydrogen to Plutonium (Video)

film, culture, science, 94 Elements, CrowdfundingIf you’re anything like me, you never memorized the periodic table and probably never will, but understanding what its symbols represent is becoming increasingly important – because many of them are running out. Enter 94 Elements, a global filmmaking project which aims to create beautiful short films that depict the every day, personal uses of each element – from Hydrogen to Plutonium.

Remember Germanium? It is used as lens coating on surgical microscopes, so one film follows an elderly man in India who reminisces  about sight, lovers and childhood while waiting to undergo eye surgery. And that’s just one element. Although award-winning filmmakers are behind the project, there will also be opportunities for novices to pitch films about an element that speaks to them.

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3000 Foot Downdraft Energy Tower Planned by Israeli Professors on Mexico-US Border

Brian Nitz
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3000 Foot Downdraft Energy Tower Planned by Israeli Professors on Mexico-US Border

downdraft energy tower Can the Energy Tower slated for US Mexico border create clean power and mitigate climate change? If Americans put Man on the moon, why not, argues Brian.

Professor Dan Zaslavsky and Dr. Rami Guetta from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are trying to develop an idea first patented by Phillip R. Carlson in 1975. In what is known as a downdraft energy tower, water is sprayed onto solar heated air at the top of a hollow tower. Now cooled and denser, this air falls rapidly to the bottom of the tower where it drives turbines and generates electricity. Annapolis Maryland – based Clean Wind Energy Tower, Inc (CWET) has plans to build two such towers near the US – Mexican border in San Luis, Arizona. At 3000 feet, the tower’s height will surpass Burj Khalifa, but unlike most skyscrapers, this one is designed to give more than it takes, in the form of clean electricity.

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Panoramic Power Opens Window To Energy Cloud and Supply Chain

Shifra Mincer
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electric box, panoramic powerShining a light on energy consumption.

What if industrial building managers could see exactly how much energy their building is using, where in the building that energy is going, and how much it is costing them at every moment to use that energy? How much energy could be saved?

One Israeli company is bringing a new device to market that will make all these things possible: Panaromic Power has developed a self-powered wireless circuit sensor that can collect data on energy usage, integrate it, and relay that information in real-time, through a cloud-based (SaaS) P3E platform, to a single dashboard.

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Egypt to Test Unique CSP Solar/Biomass Hybrid Plant

Susan Kraemer
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1
Egypt to Test Unique CSP Solar/Biomass Hybrid Plant

biomass-solar-hybrid-egyptThis wood waste may not look like fuel for a solar power plant, but it soon could be in Egypt.

A consortium of European governments, universities and research institutions are funding an innovative solar/biomass hybrid power plant test, coordinated by Italy’s national energy agency, ENEA. The EU is funding the pilot Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) project in Egypt with 11,755,049 Euros, through the EU Seventh Framework Programme.

The project will test units that can produce electricity from two renewable sources. The solar energy is to come from a concentrating solar power technology using molten salts as the heat transfer fluid, the same way that Masdar’s Gemasolar plant in Spain works, in the first 24-hour solar power plant in the world.

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Severe Water Scarcity Could Hit Arab Region by 2015

Arwa Aburawa
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1
Severe Water Scarcity Could Hit Arab Region by 2015

water tap shortageAlthough water scarcity is unlikely to lead to water waters, it is still devastating for the development and survival of any nation

The latest report by the Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED), “The Green Economy in a Changing Arab World”, definitely doesn’t make for happy reading. In fact, it is positively terrifying. According to the report, Arab countries could be facing a severe water crisis as early as 2015, with the region’s estimated annual per capita water share at less than one-tenth of the global average. That would bring it to just 500 cubic metres per capita – anything below 1,000 cubic metres is considered to pose a “significant constraint to economic development, health and well-being”. All these findings point to the fact that we are slowly but surely running out of time.

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