In the Middle East, recipes for stuffed vegetables and leaves evolved from a simple, thrifty way with meat to a culinary passion. Careful housewives have long known that a little ground meat goes a long way when artfully seasoned and combined with rice. But it took imagination and care to develop the recipes of stuffed […]
Thanks to a network of Israeli divers, and the Health Ministry, Israeli non-profit environmental association Zalul is now keeping the public up to date on the condition of the country’s waterways. By commissioning road-navigation app developer Waze to add a water-pollution application to its popular smart phone service, the founders of Zalul (which means clear […]
Who’s got the wind in the Middle East? Morocco and Egypt have the biggest wind power plants, but don’t discount Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Wind power has taken a backseat to solar power across the Middle East and North Africa, but there are still some ambitious projects in wind power […]
Scientists at Technion, Israel’s institute of technology recently found a new way to store solar energy. Their method utilizes a substance that some of us are all too familiar with, iron oxide– otherwise known as rust. This research entitled Resonant light trapping in ultrathin films for water was published in the November 11, 2012 issue […]
You can see the color white; you can hear white noise. Now, Weizmann Institute researchers from Israel show that you can also smell a “white” odor. Their research findings appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The white we see is actually a mixture of light waves of different wavelengths. […]
I had the pleasure of meeting this enterprising Bedouin woman, Miriam Aborkeek while on a Bedouin home stay and personal tour with Yeela Raanan of Bedouin Experience in Israel. Here’s Aborkeek’s story about her natural cosmetics company Desert Daughter: Once, Bedouin women roamed with the seasons, foraging for plants and helping graze animals where the rains […]
Israel’s electric car company Better Place is going to experience an overhaul, and will manage its existing resources in a new way, according to Evan Thornley, the company’s new CEO who just moved to Israel from Australia. Instead of focusing on selling Renault-made cars and charge plans to keep them juiced, the company is going […]
The Hula Valley Bird Park offers unique bird and nature-watching opportunities. We birdwatchers sat in a covered safari wagon as lines of cranes criss-crossed the evening sky. More and more cranes began to appear, and soon the air was full of powerful-looking birds calling in hoarse, creaking voices. Hundreds landed to roost in a field […]
The poorest country in the Arab world is addicted to chewing catha edulis or khat leaves, which gives men, women and children, an amphetamine-like high. Abdulmalik, a 13-year-old boy from Yemen’s capital city Sana’a, started chewing khat leaves at the age of seven. “My father would pass me small handfuls at weddings,” he told The […]
Better days for Better Place EV car company. Moshe Kaplinsky at the company’s first battery charge station in 2008. It seems things at Israel’s Better Place electric car company are going from bad to worse. Israeli news outlets are reporting that the company’s CEO Moshe Kaplinsky has quit, over disagreements with the company’s main shareholder […]
Situated above the treeline, SkyTran commuter pods will not interfere with normal traffic: Photo illustration by NASA/SkyTran Developing economical and green urban transit systems have not been easy. This includes such planned transit innovations as the commuter pod transit system being planned for Abu Dhabi’s carbon neutral Masdar City and a new commuter light rail line […]
Iraq meets Israel in Tel Aviv at this new sabich restaurant. Givatayim’s legendary eggplant-maker Oved Daniel, whom they call the “professor of sabich [Iraqi eggplant dish] science,” is opening up a new restaurant in Tel Aviv. Previously a gifted soccer player, today Daniel is a local food celebrity whose specialty sabich is one of Israel’s […]
Pollen and ash in Nile river delta sediment provides evidence of ancient climactic events including mega-droughts and wildfires which wiped out pyramid-building civilizations, says a study published in the recent July 2012 edition of Geology. They waited seventy days for her to reappear. Finally she came. For a moment just before sunrise, the bright star […]
Investors still have faith in the Israeli-led Better Place electric car company. After the board fired its visionary founder and CEO Shai Agassi, and laying off half its staff in Israel last month the company has secured a $100 million investment. The company aims to reduce range anxiety of the use of electric cars by providing […]
Israel’s Negev Desert, Jordan’s Mount Nebo, Medaba and Wadi Rum are a few dark sky destinations for stargazing. Paris is known as the city of lights. So is Medina Saudi Arabia, Be’er Sheva Israel and Las Vegas, Nevada. We shouldn’t overlook Baltimore Maryland, Varanasi India, Quanzhou China and Milford Pennsylvania. Each of these cities is also […]