First prize$2,500
A model of which earthquakes medieval Arabic chronicles were likely to miss.
Title: Auditing the Silence: A Reporting-Bias Surface for the Medieval Levantine Earthquake Record
Results ·
We received 156 essays from 130 people in 29 countries. We were so impressed by their quality that we increased the prize fund to $5,000 and awarded three essays a joint third prize. Our first report offers a closer look.
External judges helped us review selected, blinded essays. Here are the five winners and sixteen honorable mentions, published in full with their authors’ permission.
The prizes
Five winning essays.
Second prize$1,000
A pipeline that turns published Arab rare-disease cases into evidence clinicians can use.
Title: Variant annotation in the context of rare disease: From peer-reviewed publications to pipeline
Joint third prize · $500 each
Third prize (tied)$500
Liver-cancer surveillance calibrated to Egyptians who remain at risk after hepatitis C is cured.
Title: After the cure: HCC surveillance for Egypt's four million
Third prize (tied)$500
Environmental data produced at the source, with error bars and an expiry date.
Title: The Arab World Is Moving Too Fast for Its Environmental Data
Third prize (tied)$500
A controlled trial of how to bring war-damaged farmland in southern Lebanon back to life.
Title: When the Land Remembers: BIORESTORE, a Time-Resolved Biotechnology System for Lebanon’s War-Damaged Soil
These essays stood out to us for different reasons: an unexpected question, an insight drawn from firsthand experience, or a clear account of how an idea could be tested. We admired both their ambition and their attention to what the work would require. We hope the prize encourages the authors to pursue this work and helps their ideas find collaborators.
Honorable mentions
Sixteen more ideas worth reading.
Grouped by subject, in no order of merit. Each is published in full.
Health 5
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Measures of psychological distress validated in Syrian Arabic.
Title: Broken Rulers: The Missing Measurement Substrate for Mental Health in Syrian Arabic
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A bandage that shows, by eye, when bacteria in a diabetic foot wound start to coordinate.
Title: Intercepting Bacterial Conversations: A Thermostable, Instrument-Free Smart Bandage for Early-Warning Detection of Quorum Sensing in Middle Eastern Diabetic Foot Ulcers
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A dementia test built for people who switch languages all day.
Title: Lisan, لسان
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Wastewater surveillance built for heat, informal sewers, and the neighbourhoods hospitals never see.
Title: What the Sewers Know: The Missing Wastewater Genomic Surveillance System for the Arab World
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Measures of diabetes risk calibrated to Arab women.
Title: The women we cannot see
Heat & safety 3
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A fabric that is black to the eye but cold to the sun.
Title: Cooling the Black Abaya: A Technical Gap in the World's Hottest Traditional Dress
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Safe ways to keep Yemen’s highland homes warm when electricity is too precious to spend on heat.
Title: Safe Thermal Survival for Yemen’s Highland Homes
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Why trees can’t cool a desert city, and surfaces that could send its heat to space instead.
Title: The Green Mirage: Trees Won’t Save a Desert City
Environment & infrastructure 4
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Leak detection that works on the century of mismatched pipes under Beirut.
Title: Acoustic Leak Detection in Beirut’s Mixed-Material Pipes
†
Title added by the editor; the original submission was untitled. -
A way to read the condition of Syria’s buried pipes, wires, and walls after the records are gone.
Title: The City We Can't See
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A fast, cheap, credible way to tell returning farmers what war did to their soil.
Title: A Post-Conflict Soil Intelligence System
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Carbon-removal accounting that holds up in the Gulf’s carbonate soils and arid geology.
Title: The Verification Gap: Why Gulf Carbon Removal Cannot Use Temperate-Climate Science, and What Building Honest MRV in Arid Geology Requires
Language & AI 4
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A tool that pulls checkable claims out of forwarded Arabic crisis messages.
Title: The Claim Extraction Problem
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AI tutors that answer from the textbook students are actually graded on.
Title: Curriculum-Faithful AI for Iraqi and Syrian Classrooms
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An Arabic benchmark for the dialects and local realities existing model tests miss.
Title: ‘MIZAN’
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A manuscript reader trained on Maghrebi scripts, and a test for when AI quietly substitutes the printed edition.
Title: A Script-Conditioned Reader for Maghrebi-Andalusi Scientific Manuscripts
Thank you to everyone who took the time to think through a problem and write to us.
Expert review
With thanks to our judges.
They volunteered their time to review selected essays, with authors’ names and countries removed.
Ahmed Hosny, PhD
Arcadia Science
Stealth AI company formerly Meta
The Good Data Factory formerly Sephora
Amany Qaddour, DrPH
Atlantic Council also Syria Relief & Development
Page One Ventures
Angie Michaiel, PhD
The Kavli Foundation
Basem Al-Shayeb, PhD
Founder, stealth company Founder, Amber Bio
formerly Google
Gina El Nesr, PhD
HHMI/Scripps Research formerly Stanford
Habes Howail, PhD
Qatar Foundation
formerly Google X and Tesla
Isaiah Bolden, PhD
Georgia Tech
Stanford University
Emirates Genome Council
Rawan AlSubaie, PhD
Founder, stealth company formerly MIT
Stanford University
Sarah Shoker, PhD
Berkeley Risk and Security Lab formerly OpenAI
Ubadah Sabbagh, PhD
formerly Astera, Arcadia, MIT
Yousuf Baker
Columbia University
Stanford University
Zack Li, PhD
UC Berkeley