Group items tagged

"Writing in the journal Nature, they say that in western countries, conserving water for people through reservoirs and dams works for people, but not nature."

The water utility in Edmonton, EPCOR, published the most incredible graph of water consumption last week. By now you've probably heard that up to 80% of Canadians were watching last Sunday's gold medal Olympic hockey game. So I guess it stands to reason that they'd all go pee between periods.

Boiling and freezing water through changes in pressure

"Harps employs an indirect method of detection that infers the existence of orbiting planets from the way their gravity makes a parent star appear to twitch in its motion across the sky. "Our new observations with Harps mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet," said team leader Xavier Bonfils from the Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de Grenoble, France. "Because red dwarfs are so common - there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way - this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone.""

"An innovative bicycle-powered water pump, created by a student at the University of Sheffield, has proved a huge success and is now in regular production in Guatemala, transforming the lives of rural residents."

The beauty of hydrogen bonding/surface tension!

"They think they are of a kind never before discovered. The well-preserved organisms from the Ordovician period, which began about 495m years ago, lived in what is now the town of Llandrindod Wells, which was partially under water. Scientists believe they shed new light on how ocean communities have evolved."

"Adults who ate canned soup daily showed a jump in levels of the plasticizer BPA in their urine, according to a small study. The study of 75 people in Tuesday's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association is one of the first to quantify BPA levels in humans after eating canned foods compared with eating freshly prepared ingredients. Bisphenol A is an industrial chemical used to make polycarbonate plastic for water bottles and food containers as well as the protective lining in metal cans."

Live ROV feed of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill

Earthship Biotecture creates buildings that... * Heat and cool themselves naturally via solar/thermal dynamics * Collect their own power from the sun and wind * Harvest their own water from rain and snow melt * Contain and treat their own sewage on site * Produce food in significant quantities * Utilize materials that are byproducts of modern society like cans, bottles and tires

"The two developed a technique that uses bacteria to break down the foam plastic used in many disposable cups, fast-food containers and packing materials."

"A team of planet hunters led by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (three times the mass of Earth) orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star's "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one."

"Rocks examined by NASA's Spirit Mars Rover hold evidence of a wet, non-acidic ancient environment that may have been favorable for life. Confirming this mineral clue took four years of analysis by several scientists."