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2016: Editor’s choice

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Extracts from selected news and feature articles published this year.

Astrophysics

An international team of scientists, including from New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), managed to directly observe structural components of one slowly rotating star, thanks to asteroseismology. This new technique, 10,000 times more precise than its predecessor, reveals a star’s flatter, rounder contours and different rotational speeds. It allows scientists to ‘see’ the nature of the stellar interior with very high precision.

Marine science

In an unprecedented study on non-model organisms in captivity, scientists from Saudi Arabia, Australia and Norway were able to create large sequence datasets on how reef fish and their offspring react to the phenomenon of decreasing pH levels, called ocean acidification, brought on by climate change. Acidification happens due the uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide. “The amount of sequencing data we generated is unparalleled for a non-model organism,” says Timothy Ravasi, the senior author of the paper. Scientists discovered that the offspring of some reef fish can tolerate acidification by adjusting their circadian rhythm to night time function throughout the day.

Ecology and evolution

An international consortium of researchers analysed the coding portions of genes, or “exomes”, belonging to 1,794 nationals of Greater Middle Eastern (GME) countries, a region spanning from Morocco in the west to Pakistan in the east. “As expected for a region so rich in history and at the crossroads of many civilizations, the Middle East ‘variome’ [the set of genetic variations in a given population] suggests mixing with other populations, although the percentage varies greatly depending on which subpopulation you look at,” says geneticist Fowzan Alkuraya from Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center. Northwest African genes were found in people across northern Africa, most likely representing the Berber genetic background. Arabian Peninsular genes were observed in nearly all GME peoples studied, possibly the result of the Arab conquests of the seventh century. Similarly, Persian expansion in the fifth century into the Turkish peninsula, the Syrian Desert region and parts of northeast Africa probably accounts for the Persian and Pakistan genetic signal present in the peoples of those regions. The peoples of the Syrian Desert and Turkish peninsular regions show the highest levels of mixing with European populations.

Geology

Shallow, dense magma reservoirs may be responsible for the most hazardous type of volcano on Earth, according to a new study. Ivan Koulakov and colleagues, including scientists from Saudi Arabia, present a fresh seismic model, based on studying magma paths beneath the Toba volcano in Indonesia, which last erupted some 74,000 years ago. The model explains why the magma system under Toba causes large, devastating eruptions, and how such large volumes of magma are generated.

Archaeology

“We always say it can’t get any worse, and then it does — and that’s the hardest part,” says Allison Cuneo, project manager for the American Schools of Oriental Research’s Cultural Heritage Initiative (CHI), which documents the loss of Syrian heritage. CHI reported 851 incidents of damage to cultural heritage between September 2015 and August 2016, mostly concentrated in areas of northern Syria controlled by forces opposed to President Bashar al-Assad. With such extensive damage, there “is so much data on destruction to report, it’s like holding the ocean back with a broom,” says Michael Danti, the academic director of CHI.

Environment

A world atlas of artificial night sky brightness, published earlier this year in Science Advances, captured the extent to which we are smothered in light. It reveals Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as the most light-polluted places to live on the planet, topped only by Singapore. More than half of people living in Israel and Libya live through extremely bright nights, and the widest connected twilight zone in the world is along the Nile Delta in Egypt. No more can people in Kuwait and Qatar see the glowing band of the Milky Way from their homes. For more than 97 per cent of people in the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and Egypt, this is also true. “The night sky is the beginning of our civilization. It leads to all religions, philosophy, science, literature and the arts. The cultural significance of a sky full of stars is huge. The new generations have lost this source of inspiration,” says Fabio Falchi, of the Italian Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute’s Fabio Falchi, who led the study.

Astronomy

The Qatar Exoplanet Survey (QES) has discovered three new “exoplanets” outside our solar system. The planets, named Qatar-3b, Qatar-4b and Qatar-5b, are hot Jupiters: they are similar in size to Jupiter (11 times the size of Earth) and orbit very closely to their respective suns. They are located some 1400 to 1800 light years away from Earth and can be seen in the same part of the sky as the Andromeda Constellation, best observed in autumn in the northern hemisphere.

Year in review: Under pressure

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Conflict and wars have continued to bend the region out of shape in 2016, with health infrastructure in Syria and Yemen continuing to crumble and fall, and the exodus of people out of dangerous zones affecting neighboring populations. The following are some of the most critical situations borne out of the flow of people as a result of infighting in 2016.

Water

Besides the human cost of the war in Syria, the ecological and environmental impact has, no doubt, been huge. For example, earlier this month, researchers based in the US and Canada have shown how mass migrations are changing the country’s hydrological landscape.

The flight of Syrian refugees since 2013 has dramatically changed water-use patterns and led to an increased water flow into Jordan through the Yarmouk River. In the absence of direct measurement data from Syria, the scientists had turned to remote sensing techniques, combining spatial and statistical analyses of satellite imagery with water balance calculations to estimate the changes in irrigation patterns and reservoir usage in southwest Syria. While the end of a regional drought is partly responsible for the increased flow of the Yarmouk, the analysis showed that decreased water use in the Syrian part of the river basin accounts for roughly half of the 340% increase in transboundary flow.

In a way, the war in Syria carried some good for Jordan – at least in terms of water supply.

Health

War and migration had once led to outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as visceral leishmaniasis, across the region, originating from Sudan and South Sudan. And new research is warning that this could happen again. Visceral leishmaniasis is endemic in Sudan and South Sudan, where the climate allows sandflies to thrive, and poor health systems compound the problem.

Researchers from the US and Saudi Arabia have presented new evidence suggesting that conflict, and the chronic malnutrition and displacement that follow, interrupt the cycle of immunity and allow a disease like visceral leishmaniasis to flourish. Gloomily, the scientists say they expect another outbreak.

Not far off, in Aleppo, the scene of much violence and suffering, an outbreak of another form of leishmaniasis has taken place. The Aleppo boil, which is caused by a parasite in the bloodstream and transmitted through the bites of sandflies, has been reported to have infected hundreds of thousands across the Middle East, especially across refugee camps. The disease causes disfiguring lesions on the body and the numbers are bad, according to scientists.

Until recently, the disease was contained to areas around Aleppo and Damascus, but this changed with the continuous disruption of insecticide control, poor water and sanitation services in conflict zones.

2013 Year In Review: News highlights

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Looking back, 2013 carried as much good news as it did bad news for the Middle East, especially so in the fields of science, technology and health.

Perhaps the biggest story so far—political turbulence aside—is Syria’s polio problem.

The outbreak of polio virus in Syria put the entire region at risk of infection of the once-thwarted virus, especially that refugee traffic in and out of the war-torn country continued unabated regardless of health risks. There are still question marks over how the vaccination campaigns were handled in war time, whether some areas were deliberately overlooked during vital health campaigns, and currently, how international organizations working in the region are planning to face up to the challenges of mobility and access, walking a thin line between attending to a public health emergency of international concern and maneuvering delicate politics.

The region had already plunged into 2013 heavyhearted with fears of the spread of another pandemic in the wake of the outbreak of the coronavirus, known as MERS-COV in September 2012. However, despite reported infections, some fatal, mostly in Saudi Arabia, in addition to Jordan, Qatar, UAE, and Tunisia among others, the outbreak did not warrant an international emergency status. In fact, research in 2013, has brought some significant revelations about the virus to light — including how complicated its transmission chain is, and how Omani camels may have been the elusive intermediate host that carried this virus to humans.

On the water front, both literal and figurative, 2013 saw the birth of a new partnership between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. The countries will start feeding water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, in the belief that this grand project — which involves installing a 180-kilometre connection between the two sees — will save the latter from shrinking. And the World Bank is backing their game, releasing a new study that considers connecting the two seas via a channel as one of the feasible scenarios that could breathe life into the Dead Sea.

But the region’s water predicament, as revealed in 2013, is much more serious than the shrinking of the heavily saline lake. The Middle East, it turns out, has lost a drastic amount of fresh water—a Dead Sea’s worth of that.

A team of scientists released satellite images of water stores in the north-central Middle East, taken between 2003 and 2009, showing that, during this period, there was approximately 143.6 km3 less fresh water in the region between Tigris and Euphrates, which includes Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Now on the geeky front, things have been looking up, with scientists at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz’s City of Science and Technology and Texas A&M University in the US, publishing a new “mind-bogging” study that shows that communication can occur over vast distances without a physical medium—well, at least in principle.

The scientists challenged the long-held belief that for information to travel in empty space, physical particles have to be transferred — they use a complex assortment of beam splitters, mirrors and detectors to illustrate their point.

Now, on the health front, the region’s women have some work to do. Like exercise, and counting calories. A new study reveals that a dramatic increase in obesity among Arab women is threatening to become a health crisis with almost half of adult females overweight in some countries – double the rate of men.

But as some women are getting fatter, on this side at least, some are actually getting smarter. Like Iqbal El-Assad, who graduated medical school in May at the age of 20—possibly becoming the youngest Arab doctor ever.

Perhaps hers is the most inspiring story yet, out of the Middle East in 2013.

El Assad, a Weill Cornel Medical College graduate, a Palestinian by birth and Lebanese by nationality, considers herself luckier than many men and women from her generation; at least she didn’t grow up on a run-down refugee camp as many of her Palestinian brethren who were forced to leave their homes did.  That said, she says she was always close to the suffering of her people; her parents took her on multiple visits to the camps, and she saw first-hand how dire and desperate the situation can get.

The young achiever says she learnt algebra as a toddler, and she spends her free time solving mathematical problems. She made the decision to be a medical doctor at 12.

Now if this is not a beam of light in all this darkness, this editor doesn’t know what is.