The other contestants call Haytham Dsouki “the genius,” but right now the Egyptian just looks clueless. “Come on,” says a public relations expert, goading him in her snappy Lebanese Arabic. “Give us that eureka moment. The time you first thought of your invention. Your audience needs to share that feeling.”

Dsouki sighs. He’s used to crafting circuitry, not TV plotlines. Look at his body language and you can almost see him being pulled, as if by gravity, toward the studio laboratory down the hall. It’s clear that Dsouki would much rather be there, tinkering still more with his project: thin, touch-sensitive stickers embedded with circuitry that can turn any surface into a control panel.

But he also knows that this preparation is crucial. This is the final week of taping for Stars of Science , which has emerged over the course of three seasons as a breakout hit in the Arab world. The goal is to identify the most talented inventors in the region, from North Africa to Iraq. Each week, a panel of judges evaluates the progress of the contestants and sends one of them home. From an original slate of 16, only five remain. Waiting at the end: $600,000 in cash prizes, a commercial launch, and free promotion on MBC, the largest Arab cable satellite station.

In just a few days, under the bright studio lights here in Doha, Qatar, the five remaining contestants will face yet another panel of judges. Each inventor has turned his idea for a new technology into a working prototype. Now they must transform themselves: Having arrived here as scruffy homegrown inventors, they are supposed to leave as slick entrepreneurs. Right now the PR expert, Emma Shaffu, is tutoring them in the art of the one-minute elevator pitch. Near at hand is a book called Business Model Generation , which the show has provided as a guide to the contestants’ scary new reality. “You’re holding a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers,” the book’s cover announces.

His invention—which can recharge robots from a distance—looks like a trumpet mounted on a toaster.

This week the five are supposed to be honing their elevator pitches, but they’re far happier to sneak away to the lab, where they can show off their inventions. Some revel in the technical aspects. Mohammed Al-Chaari, from Tunisia, loves explaining the physics behind his wireless power transmitter, a gadget that looks like a trumpet mounted on a toaster. Others are more theatrical. “You wake up late, with just 10 minutes to get to work,” says Mohammed Al-Rifai, a rail-thin Kuwaiti. “You open your closet, and you realize that all your shirts are wrinkled. What to do?” He swivels to his invention, a 6-foot-tall, blocky white contraption. With its black plastic head, metal-toothed spine, and tangle of tubes and cables, it looks like a prop from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 . “This,” Al-Rifai says with a flourish, “is Kwili, the first steam-ironing robot for the home.”

In the lab, each of the five contestants has a specially outfitted station where his project, developed over months of false starts and late nights, is set up for display. At Dsouki’s outpost, he has used his transparent, flexible stickers to create touch controls for bathroom fixtures. Between the sink and the mirror, a green triangle of light glows faintly; touch it with a finger and water suddenly flows from the faucet. Other spots on the wall change the temperature, the flow rate. A telephone dial pad turns a plate-glass shower door into a speakerphone.

As they show off their inventions today, the young men seem completely relaxed, at ease. That’s not just because they feel more at home in a lab than at a conference room table; it’s also because the klieg lights are dark, the cameras off. It doesn’t count. This Thursday, by contrast, the five will be pitching not just to judges but to millions of Arab viewers, whose phone-in votes will go half of the way toward determining the ultimate winner. This upcoming taping will be the last elimination round before the final episode, which will air live many months from now, in December, when the four who survive will divide the prize money between them. It’s the cruelest sort of musical chairs: When the music stops this week, four of these five young men will win a very valuable seat, and the other one will get sent home with nothing.

We do not tend to think of the Middle East as a fount of science and invention. History, though, tells the Arabs otherwise. Stars of Science gestures a thousand years back into the Arab past, to a time when mathematics, physics, and biology in the Middle East advanced far beyond the knowledge of the ancient Greeks. Polymaths in the region—men like Alhazen of Basra and the Banu Musa brothers of Baghdad—were laying the groundwork for everything from sophisticated lenses to pneumatic machines several centuries before Europe caught up. Stars of Science, says Fouad Mrad, a Lebanese electrical engineer who serves as the show’s scientific adviser, is about “proving that Arabs can still invent.”

The Finalists and Their Inventions After months of dreaming, tinkering, and hard-nosed selling, the original group of 16 contestants was whittled down to these five, whose inventions ranged from consumer appliances to construction equipment to industrial robotics.

Mohammed Al-Chaari TUNISIA Al-Chaari wants to help oil and gas companies solve a thorny problem: Their pipeline-inspecting robots run out of batteries too fast. Al-Chaari’s solution? This wireless charging device, which can beam microwaves down pipelines to give the bots juice. Bilal Al-Dukhan SYRIA Al-Dukhan designed this mold for making cement blocks. A computer-controlled cooling unit regulates the temperature of the cement as it solidifies. The result is a device that can make concrete blocks much faster than conventional methods can—in just one day instead of six. Mohammed Al-Rifai KUWAIT Al-Rifai rigged up this 6-foot-tall contraption, a steam-ironing robot for the home. There’s pressure on Al-Rifai to succeed: The previous year’s winner, also a Kuwaiti, has already raised nearly $2 million in VC funding and is considered a national hero. Haytham Dsouki EGYPT Dsouki engineered these nearly imperceptible stickers embedded with circuitry. They’re touch-sensitive, so they can turn any surface into an interface. In Dsouki’s business plan, the killer app is the high tech bathroom: faucets controlled from a flat wall, music controlled by your bathrobe sleeve. Ziad Sankari LEBANON Sankari built this wearable heart monitor, which uses real-time EKG tracking to predict an imminent heart attack. It can even call your doctor for you. “For every dollar you invest, you’re saving a life,” he tells the judges.

For the 16 contestants, meanwhile, being selected for the show (from some 7,000 applicants) is the first time they’ve ever had the resources they need to pursue their ideas: custom lab space, access to materials and manufacturing technology, mentoring from outside experts. They’re marrying Arab history to a very 21st-century, very American ambition: to create products, to start a company, to make it big as an engineer-entrepreneur.

For this particular season, the popular revolts going on throughout the region have added an unwelcome layer of drama. At the moment that Bilal Al-Dukhan, the Syrian contestant, was under the bright lights, welcoming the judges to his station, he hadn’t heard from his family in weeks—telephone and Internet were blocked—and there were reports of mass arrests and torture. His hometown is Daraa, the epicenter of the Syrian uprising. No one involved with the show is saying it, but everyone is thinking it: What if Al-Dukhan is sent home on Friday? Some worry he may simply vanish once he returns to Daraa: “The government is arresting so many young men from there,” says Zeina Sawaya, a producer. But if he is feeling pressure, Al-Dukhan certainly doesn’t show it. Despite his slight paunch and his stubble, both of which make him look a bit older than his 24 years, he cuts a graceful figure onscreen. He paints in the air with his fingers as he speaks, patting the side of his fridge-sized invention: a computer-controlled mold for making ultrastrong concrete blocks.

While waiting for Thursday’s taping, the five men spend their off-camera hours together in what seems to be genuine comradeship, lost in animated discussions about both engineering and politics. At 28, Al-Chaari, the Tunisian, is the dignified elder of the group, with the handsome look of an early-career Colonel Gadaffi. “I did not protest in the beginning,” he says, about the uprising that sparked the Arab spring in December 2010. “I was working on a pipeline in the desert. But after the president was removed, then I did join the protests.” His native dialect is difficult for the other Arabs to understand, so Al-Chaari speaks in classical Arabic, the language of holy men and TV news anchors. (It doesn’t come across in translation, so imagine the voice of a royal herald.) It makes him an easy target for ribbing.

“So basically, you waited until the government fell before protesting the government?” Dsouki asks. They all chuckle as Al-Chaari tries to defend himself.

“It did not fall all at once!” he says, before giving up with a shrug.

When the conversation turns to Egypt, Dsouki surprises them. “Yes, I was on the streets,” he says. “I was in the neighborhood guard.” The others pause for a moment to take this in. Before he left for Doha to appear on the show, Dsouki says, he was part of the vigilante gangs that filled the vacuum left by the corrupt police force. He helped to fight off pro-government thugs, to capture looters. His weapon? “I used a club,” he says quietly. Dsouki is as short and slight as a middle schooler, with a childlike laugh to match. His hands are delicate and nimble, as one might expect from a circuitry wizard. It is difficult to imagine him in a game of soccer, let alone a street fight.

“You know,” Al-Rifai says, shaking his head, “revolution is not always good.”

“He has to say that because he’s Kuwaiti,” says Ziad Sankari, the Lebanese contestant. (Oil-rich Kuwait has one of the highest per capita incomes in the Arab world, with essentially no disaffected lower class to rise up.) The young men erupt in laughter once again. But they’re all aware that Al-Rifai’s short life has been far from easy. In the summer of 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s tanks rumbled across the border into Kuwait, his mother was five months pregnant with him. The Iraqis rounded up influential people to make examples of them, including Al-Rifai’s father. Although he was just a young imam—20, the same age as Al-Rifai is today—his father was part of the local resistance, coordinating supplies. Iraqi soldiers shot him twice in the back and dumped the body in the street outside his mosque. His son became a computer whiz who, at the age of 16, placed fifth in Botball, an international robotics competition. (He programmed his team’s bot to deviously steal resources from its competitors.)

Al-Rifai changes the topic. “Have I shown you my idea for perpetual-motion transportation?” he asks. “No, I’m serious! It follows the laws of physics, but it has a sneaky trick.” He pulls out some paper and begins sketching. In spite of the punishing sleep deprivation of the past week, they huddle around a coffee table talking science into the night.

In the morning, after a rushed breakfast, the contestants are whisked by van to the Qatar Science & Technology Park, an enormous, half-constructed complex of office and lab spaces where the show is filmed. On the drive over, Dsouki sits in the back, toying with a component for his invention. It looks like an unruly snarl of circuitry glued to a glass wafer. In fact, it’s the guts of an iPod, hooked up to a thumbnail-sized XBee wireless modem. Attach this and his stickers to a piece of clothing—the sleeve of a jacket, for example—and you have a wireless remote control that detects motion and sends signals to your stereo and other gadgets. The real challenge has been battery life, since the circuit requires a constantly oscillating flow of electricity. Maintaining that current is a drain, and you also risk turning your music on and off accidentally as you move. Dsouki’s workaround: a mercury switch that detects the angle of the sleeve and fires up the circuit only when the arm is raised.

This long, messy process of tinkering and failure is at the heart of Stars of Science. Take, for example, Al-Chaari’s never-ending struggle with his wireless power transmitter. His target market is the oil and gas industry, which uses robots to crawl through pipes, scanning for cracks with x-rays and welding where needed. But the robots’ batteries limit the distance they can go, and when they run out of juice—which they frequently do—another robot often has to go in and retrieve them. Al-Chaari realized that pipelines are just the right shape and size to channel microwaves along their length. It should be possible to beam energy down the pipe, where it would be captured by a receiver bolted onto the crawler robot miles away, charging the battery remotely.

As the show documented on camera, this proved far easier said than done. When Al-Chaari set up a magnetron—similar to the one in your microwave oven—at one end of a pipe, the robot at the other end didn’t receive the power: The pipe was absorbing the low-frequency microwaves he was beaming into it. Al-Chaari tried using a higher frequency, dialing it up to 1.2 gigahertz. But that fried his equipment. Then he tried to dampen the radiation by using a ferrite shield, but that became blazingly hot. On the edge of a nervous breakdown after around-the-clock experimentation, he finally came up with a solution: ceramic resistors, to limit the power shooting into the battery. The moment he flipped the switch on the magnetron and the bot came alive, Al-Chaari literally danced for joy. He called his family in Tunisia to share the good news, and across the room, the television cameras clearly picked up the sound of his mom ululating.

As with engineering startups everywhere, the projects of some early-round contestants didn’t always work out. The only Qatari contestant on this year’s show invented a stationary exercise trainer for injured horses, essentially a giant four-legged StairMaster. The machine worked perfectly, until he tried it out on an actual horse. There was no railing on the ramp to prevent the animal from falling or jumping off. If a hoof remained locked in place, it could mean a broken leg and certain euthanasia. Lucky for the horse, it never got that far: The beautiful thoroughbred that they tried to lead up the ramp got one look at the strange footing and froze, wide-eyed, before backing away. (Engineers, ignore the end user at your peril.)

All five finalists have survived the engineering and design phases: Their inventions now work. But for the final stretch, they must convince the judges that their products are good investments. That is why their task today is to work on their spreadsheets, tallying costs and projecting profits for the businesses they would build around their inventions.

At Thursday’s taping, one of the five will be eliminated, and the other four will move on to the final round. Each will get a cut of the $600,000 pot, in shares ranging from $300,000 for first place down to $50,000 for fourth. (To put those figures in perspective, Al-Chaari’s father in Tunisia supports a family of five on a monthly salary of $150.) But at least as valuable as the cash is the public exposure waiting for those who pass this round. Anyone in the final episode gets a massive boost toward commercial success. Many of the previous year’s finalists founded their own businesses; last year’s winner, a 27-year-old Kuwaiti who built an automated analyzer for chemical samples, has garnered nearly $2 million in venture capital and is treated like a national hero. This year’s aspirants hope the same might happen to them.

The horse took one look at the giant exercise machine for injured animals and froze, wide-eyed, before backing away.

One afternoon, the Stars are freed for the day at 2:30 pm—a rare deviation from the show’s usual 12-hour work routine. The five hurry downstairs, but they don’t get far: No one can open the plate-glass air lock between the frigid air-conditioned lobby and the technology park’s subterranean garage. One of the chauffeurs finally arrives, swiping a key card with sufficiently high security clearance to exit the building. The moment their van emerges into Qatar’s burning afternoon light, Al-Rifai shields his pale face. “Ah!” he says. “It is the first time in months that we see the sun.” They look like rescued hostages.

For the trip back to the hotel, the van pulls out into the sparse flow of luxury SUVs heading east toward the Persian Gulf—or, as it is called here, the Arabian Gulf. Doha looks more like a giant’s outdoor sculpture park than a living city. The buildings have the zany curves and insults to gravity that are fashionable these days, but as one drives by and gets a closer look, many of them look empty or barely used. Except for a promenade along the bay, there is almost nowhere to walk. Then again, there don’t seem to be any pedestrians even on the promenade. Except for the Asian construction workers toiling in the hellish heat, no one spends more than a minute outside.

The contours of Education City come into view. The buildings are branded with the names of US universities—Georgetown, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, and more—lured here by Qatari cash. The country’s ruler, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, fears that without homegrown technologists and entrepreneurs, Qatar will simply fall apart if (or when) the oil runs out. But persuading the brightest young people from across the Arab world to come study science hasn’t been easy. The cost of creating Stars of Science—almost certainly in the tens of millions of dollars—is just another rational investment in trying to nurture the region’s science and engineering talent.

After spending most of their free half-day hibernating at La Cigale Hotel, the five-star prison where the show has put them up, the five young men gather in the lobby for an outing. Their destination is a shopping mall, though they don’t intend to buy anything. “We are going to T.G.I. Friday’s!” Al-Rifai says with genuine glee.

When the van drops them off at the entrance to the mall, they pause to savor the opulence. The interior proves even more mesmerizing. A canal filled with bright blue water snakes through a replica of Venice. The ceiling has been painted in the Italian fresco style to look like the sky. Women covered head to toe in abayas and veils stroll by the H&M shop window, glancing at Western clothing they wear only in the privacy of their homes. A family glides by in a gondola, the black-veiled wife sitting primly next to her white-robed husband.

After snapping photos of one another at the water’s edge, the contestants follow the canal toward the restaurant. A Friday’s server in the standard, garish uniform cheerfully waves them over to their reserved table. The menu is the same here as it is in the US, minus the alcohol and the pork. Soon they are happily gorging themselves on greasy fried chicken and beef ribs.

“We are the science revolution,” says one contestant, sipping a fruit mocktail at T.G.I. Friday’s. “We just need money.”

For the most part, the young men seem unaware of the strange and sometimes contradictory cultural currents tugging at them. They are as tech-savvy as any American their age and just as much creatures of the consumer culture. Al-Chaari says his hero is still MacGyver, the American television character who hacks his way out of trouble. (Al-Chaari grew up watching the show dubbed in French.) But in other ways they find Western culture alienating. The grinding work schedule often clashes with their routine of five daily prayers. The presence of women is also an issue. Neither Al-Rifai nor Dsouki will shake hands with a woman. There was a single female contestant on Stars of Science this year, Sereen Sharairi, a Jordanian biomedical engineer. She was universally liked and respected by the other contestants. But the more conservative young men were careful not to get too physically close on camera. Al-Rifai says it was for fear of “misunderstanding” on the part of the audience back home.

One thing that they all share with Americans their age: supersize dreams. Al-Chaari is already talking about expanding from oil and gas into the nuclear energy industry, even though his wireless power-beaming invention is still in the earliest stages of testing. Dsouki has the same confidence in his touch-sensitive circuitry, which he expects will soon control the bathroom lighting in every public school in Egypt. Then again, confidence goes a long way in this business. “We are the science revolution,” says Al-Rifai, sipping a Friday’s fruit mocktail. “We just need money.”

Thursday. When they arrive at the studio, they’re hustled away to be groomed and mic’d. A live audience is assembling in the studio, a mixture of Qatari VIPs and Doha-based foreigners. The host of Stars of Science, Khalid Al-Jumaily, a well-known sports commentator and radio host, is a bundle of nervous energy. He fusses with his headdress and stammers like a skipping record, forcing the cameras to retape his flubbed lines. When the contestants are introduced, they each enter dramatically like pro sports celebs through a winding gangway, but due to technical glitches, some of them have to exit and reenter. The audience dutifully applauds each time.

First up is Sankari, who will be defending the viability of his wearable heart monitor. “He comes from the land of Phoenician merchants,” intones Al-Jumaily, as a prerecorded highlight reel of Sankari cues up, finishing with a slick presentation of his invention. The product now has a name—Lifesense—and a clever logo. “Every one of us knows someone who has died from heart problems,” Sankari says. “Lifesense sends the heart’s pulse directly to a center.” He ends with hard numbers and a snappy send-off. “We need $120,000 from Middle Eastern markets. For every dollar you invest, you’re saving a life.” Sankari is convincing, and his invention looks great. But in the American Idol tradition, the judges sit stony-faced, paying few compliments.

“You show you’ll make $9 million in a few years,” says Mohamed Salem Al-Kuwari, director of a Doha-based aeronautics center, as he flips through the pages of Sankari’s business plan. “Could you explain how you got those numbers … and where your optimism comes from?” Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani, vice president of education at the Qatar Foundation, adds that the business plan makes no mention of the Arab uprising. Disruption to a city’s health infrastructure could prove a serious stumbling block to Sankari’s plans.

The other judges are equally blunt. “Your business will depend on governments,” says Naif Al-Mutawa, the Kuwaiti creator of The 99 , the Islamic comic book that got a shout-out from President Obama during his speech in Cairo in 2009. “They will haggle about price, that’s for sure. How are you going to deal with that?”

Sankari refuses to be intimidated. He spouts off quick, smart answers to every question. The $9 million? That’s a conservative estimate, and he has projections to back it. Dealing with Arab governments? He has a detailed plan, starting in Lebanon, where he has excellent connections. The Arab Spring? It is not affecting the medical profession. (Sadly, he later says, it might be boosting business.) It’s clear that Sankari’s Western education is paying off: While doing a two-year engineering degree in Ohio, he took part in an entrepreneurship contest and launched a business around a medical invention. His partners bought him out last year. So he is no stranger to being grilled by investors.

For the others, this seems to be new terrain. They haven’t prepared anything like Sankari’s armament of market data and catchphrases. Al-Rifai is wearing a thawb,the crisp ankle-length tunic worn by men here. It was a good move—it makes him look older. He struggles to address the judges’ questions about the cost of his ironing bot, but he doesn’t lose his cool. Neither does Dsouki, though the judges are unimpressed with his vague business strategy.

The interrogation shakes Al-Chaari, though. At one point, the judges want to know why the projected profits of his invention, now branded with the name Powerwave, are expected to decrease over the first few years. “It’s not a drop,” he retorts. “I want to use the money for R&D.”

“I’m an investor!” Al-Thani fires back. “I want to make money, not do research.” Al-Chaari tries to defend himself, but they cut him off. “We wish you all the best,” the judges say as they mark down his scores. Al-Chaari is visibly drained.

When it’s Al-Dukhan’s turn, things get genuinely ugly. The judges notice a glaring hole in his business plan. His invention—which makes prefabricated concrete blocks in one day, rather than the usual six—has two parts: a big liquid cooling unit to control the temperature of cement as it solidifies and a mold for exchanging heat and giving the cement its shape. But his plan left out the cost of the mold, and he skimped on other expenses. The judges press him to give a more reasonable estimate.

Instead of answering, Al-Dukhan bombastically sidesteps any question of cost. “The industry doesn’t really care about anything other than time.”

The judges keep pressing, but he just keeps on spinning, even when their patience is obviously wearing thin. “Are you done?” one finally asks, cutting him off. Al-Dukhan seems to be holding back a smile, as if he’s enjoying their exasperation.

After the grilling, it all ends in less than a minute. The host reads off the scores, from first to last. Unsurprisingly, Sankari and his medical device win this round. Al-Chaari and Al-Rifai hear their names next and sigh with relief. And then there is a long pause before the reading of the fourth name. “Haytham Dsouki.” The Egyptian immediately jumps up, cheers, starts embracing the others. He has survived. But at a time when daily reports of rapes and violence are pouring out of Syria, Al-Dukhan is being sent home.

On hearing the news, he looks peaceful, even relieved. The audience leaves; the crew removes the microphone from his jacket. “I was sad for only 10 minutes,” says Al-Dukhan. “My life will continue. I will keep inventing.”

But the next day, he discovers that he will not be allowed to take home the brain of his invention. The touchscreen computer he built—loaded with his cement-hardening code—is seen by the US as a “dual-use” technology, making it illegal to export to Syria. (Qatar has an understanding with the US that such restrictions are enforced here.) After he gets the news, Al-Dukhan finally breaks down in bitter tears of frustration. The next day, he boards a plane to Damascus and an unknown fate.

Five months later, in December, the four remaining contestants gather one last time. The cameras are broadcasting live. For the opening act, as a huge videoscreen displays a paean to the glories of science and engineering, a troupe of break-dancing rollerbladers careen and flip around a dancing ballerina onstage. Next, a montage of clips rehashes the past year of failure, tinkering, and triumph. Only then do the four remaining contestants make their final pitches to the judges, and also to the Arab viewers who are casting the popular vote by phone. After all the introducing and rehashing, the verdict comes with surprising speed. “The winner for this season of Stars of Science is Haytham Dsouki from Egypt!” says the host. Dsouki drops to his knees and presses his forehead against the ground. Sankari, Al-Chaari, and Al-Rifai embrace one another. “I wish you all a thousand good nights,” the host says to the audience as the credits roll.

In the Arab world as in the West, it seems, elegant design comes out on top. Potential impact couldn’t have been the yardstick: Sankari’s wearable heart monitor might save thousands of lives per year, while Al-Chaari’s robot charger could save millions of dollars. All Dsouki had made was a tiny circuit in a plastic sticker. But it was beguilingly simple, and it could turn anything into an iPhone-like interface. This Arab, a kid from a working-class Cairo neighborhood, had come up with an invention that wouldn’t feel out of place in an Apple store. What better way, in 2011, to connect Arab audiences with their ancient, inventive past?

Meanwhile, after weeks of silence, the Syrian, Al-Dukhan finally replies to email. “I am fine, thank God,” he says. By the time he returned to Daraa, the battle had shifted to the north. His stint on Stars of Science was just long enough for him to miss the worst of the violence. Aside from shortages of food and supplies due to a military blockade of his town, his life goes on much as it did before the show. He spends his days alone in a workshop in his parents’ basement, already busy with the next invention: a new type of plaster that resists cracking. He is filled not with bitterness but pride, both in having been on the show and in his fellow contestants’ accomplishments. “I hope,” he writes, “that you have received a good impression of the Arabs.”

John Bohannon (gonzo@aaas.org) wrote about mirror-image DNA in issue 18.12.