In an effort to gain some knowledge...

Israel is apparently a center of technology companies and innovation. Intel's Israel design team is supposedly renowned.

Israel Inside: A history of Intel's R&D in Israel | ZDNet was something I dug up.

Michael Eisenstadt and David Pollock: Israel's High-Tech Pipeline to the U.S. - WSJ.com is something else I dug up. If you can't read the article, Google for Israel's High-Tech Pipeline to the U.S. and click thru.

I'm pretty sure

is what aired that I watched long ago that briefly touched on the high tech industry there.

 

you're making my point.

 

Algebra, and some other math stuff (irrational numbers, proof by induction): Mathematics in medieval Islam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(a BBC documentary about the history of math: The Story of Maths - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

And some other words that start with "al-": List of English words of Arabic origin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I assume if those things were significant enough in the Middle East to borrow words for those things from them, Middle Easterners made some sort of significant contribution.

 

As for the contributions of that little slice of Terra... there are some... yes... I'm sure of it.

Recent contributions... hmmmmmmm...

 

Russian advancements in The Space Program are well documented.

Israel is the only Middle Eastern country in the top 20 of patents granted. With a population of only 7 million people that is impressive.

Much of the patents come from a Japan , China and the USA. They are also the worlds largest economies.

 

Don't forget the Hindu-Arabic numeral system we use now, much more useful than the Roman numeral system from Europe.

Very good astronomy too, long before Europe, though the Chinese were also quite good.

 

The ME was a technology leader in the Bronze Age in 3,300 BC.

 

Ah yes, I knew there were more but couldn't remember those.

Basically, my answer to OP is "a lot", with a heavy focus on older things, since I think the ME is considered [the major] "cradle of civilization".

I found an nice list: Science in the medieval Islamic world - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"father of surgery", "the first to describe pulmonary circulation", peer review, math stuff, etc.

Top 10 ancient Arabic scientists | COSMOS magazine
http://www.csames.illinois.edu/documents/outreach/Science_in_the_Middle_East.pdf

 

Don't overlook that 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour come directly from that region by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. 24 hours in a day comes from the Egyptians. 7 days a week comes from the Babylonians. (Obviously our 40 hour work week is the result of a crafty middle east conspiracy.) It's only when we get to 12 months in a year that we get out of that region since the moon established that.

 

When I got out of the service, I was totally unprepared to handle the concept of a "time card". When every hour of you time is controlled by an organization, the transition into where the organization only controls 40 hours of it was hard to grasp. Did not take long to figure it out though.

 

Does anyone have something more recent than the time before Christ?

 

Islamic contributions to science are hard to pin down because they were a wide-spread trading culture that assimilated many advances that probably originated in India. Algebra, the base 10 number system, and zero come to mind as examples.

 

Prius

Source: Wikipedia

 

As an Easter European... briefly:
Constitution of May 3, 1791 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Commission of National Education - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marie Curie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stefan Banach - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stefan Kudelski - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BTW - the most advanced programmable calculators of HP used the RPN*) - these calculators were used (AFAIK) by the early NASA space missions.

*) Reverse Polish Notation

 

It's mainly historical, but the British-Iraqi physicist (I don't normally hyphenate, but he grew up in both places) Jim al-Khalili did a good two-part documentary for the BBC on science and Islam. Episode 1 is about an hour long, and it's on YouTube.

Part 2 is here:

As for Eastern Europeans, no-one has mentioned the ballpoint pen. László Bíró - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

And there's something we're all going to owe our lives to after antibiotics become useless: phage therapy. Phage therapy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. I heard about this on the World Service recently - listen to it at BBC World Service - Health Check, Bacteriophages , The potential of phage therapy . Apparently the Russians have been using it for nearly a century, and it's far more disease-specific than antibiotics.

And, of course, there's all the space stuff. I heard recently that Russian rockets have always been way more reliable than the American and Eastern European ones.

 

Of course, I have forgotten to point out that what limits the achievements of Eastern Europeans and the Islamic world is that Scots invented everything. My Gran used to explain this to me on a regular basis.