While artificial intelligence tools can enhance efficiency, customer engagement and communications, many specialists find AI lacking when they need to converse in languages with multiple dialects, such as Arabic. With public and private sectors alike requiring Arabic, efforts are underway to advance AI’s accessibility and application.

Underwater photographer and writer Eric Hanauer’s work for AramcoWorld exposed an entirely new audience to the rich marine life of the Red Sea. From his home in California, he reflects on his four-plus-decade career.

Tunisia, where figs are one of the signature crops, has been an integral part of a just-concluded Mediterranean research project, FIGGEN, to assess how the trees thrive while climate changes are causing other crops to fail. For nearly four years scientists have worked to identify specific genetic traits that enable figs’ resilience and which varieties cope best with heat and drought. When FIGGEN publishes the results, farmers concerned for their future livelihoods may choose to grow the most promising types. Additionally, the study aims to plant a seed for preserving the biodiversity of increasingly arid ecosystems.

Mangroves have been drawing increasing global attention for a quiet superpower: the ability to store up to five times more carbon than tropical forests. While coastal development, uncontrolled aquaculture, sea-level rise and warming temperatures have all contributed to the 35 percent decline in mangrove forests worldwide since the 1970s, government agencies, scientists and local communities are increasingly rallying to protect and replant mangroves. One group is taking restoration to notably new heights.

Stimulated most recently by nutrition studies and marketing, pistachios are more available worldwide than ever. But today’s efforts are possible only thanks to patient bioengineering some 3,000 years ago.

Strength, speed and a lustrous coat made the Karabakh horse a symbol of status, power and beauty in its native Azerbaijan, and beyond. Wars over the past century nearly eliminated them, but now breeders are steadily restoring their numbers.

Joining math, physics and real-world tests, Abu 'Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, who worked in 10th-century Iraq, pioneered not only optics but also empirical science itself.

The black eyeliner known widely today as kohl was used much by both men and women in Egypt from around 2000 BCE—and not just for beauty or to invoke the the god Horus. It turns out kohl was also good for the health of the eyes, and the cosmetic’s manufacture relied on the world’s first known example of “wet chemistry”—the use of water to induce chemical reactions.

From North African deserts to Indo-Pacific archipelagos, creatures of the lands, seas and skies have been depicted in art, venerated in temples and hunted for more than 8,000 years. Now they are increasingly protected.