• Water

    International university students and water experts have converged at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to foster an intellectual and research community on a scarce natural resource — water

  • Water

    Many organic contaminants in the air and in drinking water need to be detected at very low-level concentrations; researchers have investigated the use of graphene oxide films in which the semiconductor titanium dioxide (TiO2) and metal nanoparticles are deposited on opposite sides of the graphene surface

  • Water

    Twelve years into a $13.5billion state and federal effort to save the Florida Everglades, little progress has been made in restoring the core of the ecosystem, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council; expedited restoration projects that improve the quality and amount of water in this area are necessary to reverse ongoing declines

  • Water

    All water treatment plants using membrane technology are required to be able to perform three processes to comply with international standards: identify whether there are any bacteria or contaminants; detect any broken membrane filters in the treatment plant; and pinpoint which filter is broken — accurate to 1 in 100,000 filters; a new, innovative device performs all three processes

  • Water

    There is no life without water; catastrophes like droughts or strong rains reflect our dependence on the water cycle and climate system; it is thus important to understand details of the water cycle among the atmosphere, oceans, and land

  • Water

    Many jurisdictions across the united States manage and regulate surface water and groundwater without any recognition of the connections between the two; for instance, California has no legal framework for comprehensively managing the impacts of groundwater pumping; across most of California, well owners can pump as much as they like with little accountability for the impacts on rivers, other water users and ecosystems

  • Water shortage

    The U.S. food supply may be vulnerable to rapid groundwater depletion from irrigated agriculture; for example, from 2006 to 2009, farmers in the south of California’s Central Valley depleted enough groundwater to fill the U.S. largest man-made reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas — a level of groundwater depletion that is unsustainable at current recharge rates

  • Infrastructure

    By understanding the variety of pore sizes and spatial patterns in strata, geologists can help achieve more production from underground oil reservoirs and water aquifers; better understanding also means more efficient use of potential underground carbon storage sites, and better evaluations of the possible movement of radionuclides in nuclear waste depositories to determine how well the waste will be isolated

  • Water

    Lake Mead, on the Colorado River, is the largest reservoir in the United States, but users are consuming more water than flows down the river in an average year, which threatens the water supply for agriculture and households; researchers suggest that to solve this imbalance, a water cap-and-trade system, successfully implemented in Australia, should be considered for interstate water trading

  • Infrastructure protection

    Those in charge of infrastructure protection must now worry about another source of sea level rise: water pumped out of the ground for irrigation, drinking water, and industrial use; this water ends up emptying into the world’s oceans, and scientists calculate that by 2050, groundwater pumping will cause a global sea level rise of about 0.8 millimeters per year

  • Infrastructure protection

    Those in charge of infrastructure protection must now worry about another source of sea level rise: water pumped out of the ground for irrigation, drinking water, and industrial use; this water ends up emptying into the world’s oceans, and scientists calculate that by 2050, groundwater pumping will cause a global sea level rise of about 0.8 millimeters per year

  • Water

    The Floating Sensor Network project at UC Berkeley is building a water monitoring system that can be deployed in estuarine environments and rivers, and can be integrated into existing water-monitoring infrastructure

  • Water

    The American West has a drinking problem; on farms and in cities, people who live in that region are guzzling water at an alarming rate; scientists say that to live sustainably, they should use no more than 40 percent of the water from the Colorado River Basin; currently, however, they use 76 percent, nearly double the sustainable benchmark

  • Water

    Very little of Earth’s water is usable in everyday life; about 96 percent of water on Earth is saline; of the total freshwater, over 68 percent is locked up in ice and glaciers; another 30 percent of freshwater is in the ground; rivers are the source of most of the fresh surface water people use, but they only constitute about 300 mi3 (1,250 km3), about 1/10,000th of one percent of total water

  • Water

    Nearly 80 percent of disease in developing countries is linked to bad water and sanitation; now scientists have developed a simple, cheap way to make water safe to drink, even if it is muddy

  • Water

    Water-testing technology has never been fast enough to keep up with changing conditions, nor accessible enough to check all waters; researchers have developed a rapid testing method using a simple paper strip that can detect E. coli in water within minutes; the new tool can close the gap between outbreak and detection, improving public safety

  • Water

    Several hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia depend, to varying degrees, on the freshwater reservoirs of the Himalayan glaciers; it is thus important to detect the potential impact of climate changes on the Himalayan glaciers at an early stage; together with international researchers, glaciologists from the University of Zurich now show that the glaciers in the Himalayas are declining less rapidly than was previously thought; the scientists, however, see major hazard potential from outbursts of glacial lakes

  • Disasters

    The use of a more streamlined process to recycle wastewater could have saved Brisbane from severe flooding in 2011 and mitigated recent flood risks in NSW, a leading water expert says

  • Water

    The Arizona-Sonora region has been called the front line of ongoing climate change, with global climate models projecting severe precipitation decreases and temperature increases coupled with vulnerability from urbanization, industrialization and agricultural intensification

  • Water shortages

    Only nine states in the United States have taken comprehensive steps to address their vulnerabilities to the water-related consequences of changes in climate — rainfall events which increase flooding risks to property and health change, and drought conditions which threaten supply for municipalities, agriculture, and industries — while twenty-nine states are unprepared for growing water threats to their economies and public health