Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.

“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”

{ NASA | Continue reading }

previously { Consider the implications of discovering that life had evolved independently on Mars. That discovery would suggest that the emergence of life is not very improbable. }

photo { Neilsonnn }

The push to turn water into the new wine is a marketing phenomenon: The bottled-water industry is engaged in an intense effort to convince Americans that the stuff in bottles is substantially different from the stuff out of the tap.

But empirical tests have repeatedly shown that they are generally the same. In blind taste tests, many people who swear they can differentiate between bottled-water brands and tap water fail to spot the differences, and studies have shown that both are fine to drink, and both occasionally can have quality problems.

Experts who study bottled water as a cultural phenomenon say differences between the two are largely marketing inventions.

There is abundant irony in such marketing: The supply of clean drinking water across America and in many other countries is an underappreciated scientific and technological achievement that in many ways rivals putting a man on the moon. Trillions of dollars have been spent to get clean drinking water to people at virtually no cost — and it is people in precisely these countries who seem willing to pay premiums of 1,000 percent to 10,000 percent for bottled water.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

related { Which industry makes the most misleading ads? }

{ via kellyhyde }

A recent editorial in the Journal of the American Society for Nephrology is getting wide press coverage for debunking the so-called “8×8″ theory—the popularly held belief that drinking eight 8-ounce glasses of water daily helps remove toxins, improve skin tone, and increase satiety, among other health benefits. The authors chalk up the belief to folklore, and newspaper reports claim ignorance as to its provenance. Just how long has this idea been around?

Two-hundred years, at least. The most commonly cited source for the 8×8 myth is the U.S. government-sponsored Food and Nutrition Board. The board’s “Recommended Dietary Allowances” from 1945 include the following advice:

A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 liters daily in most instances. An ordinary standard for diverse persons is 1 milliliter for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.

According to this theory, people ignored the last part of the statement, which points out that you can get most of that water just by eating. If you actually had to drink all 2.5 liters, you’d need around 10 8-ounce glasses per day. (…) However, the Explainer has uncovered evidence of the 8×8 myth going all the way back to 1796, in a German text by Dr. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland called Makrobiotik. The book includes an anecdote about the surgeon general to the king of Prussia, a vibrant 80-year-old man who had “contracted the habit of drinking daily from seven to eight glasses” of cold water and thus “enjoyed much better health than in his youth.”

{ Slate | Continue reading }

photo { impale }

As thousands of people pour into emergency rooms and millions line up to be vaccinated, Brazil’s public health officials and recently even its military are fighting to control vector-borne diseases. Mosquitoes are carrying illnesses like dengue and yellow fever into Brazil’s largest cities, including Rio and Brasília, and the tropical disease, chikungunya, previously unheard of in Italy, was reported there last year. The two recent outbreaks in Brazil have caused a total of more than 80 deaths, 57,000 new infections, and widespread panic. As a result of global warming, mosquitoes, ticks, rodents and other vectors are expanding their geographic range and altering long-established patterns of disease. Climate changes worldwide are also causing serious problems with food and water supplies, increasing mental health concerns, and exacerbating air pollution, which elevates chronic disease risk.

Global temperature increases of 0.9°F (0.5°C) over the past century have led to an estimated 150,000 deaths and the loss of 5.5 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) annually, with the rates expected to double over the next several decades. The World Health Organization (WHO) has documented 39 new or re-emerging diseases since the 1960’s, many linked to global warming — an explosion of illnesses that has not been seen since the Industrial Revolution when masses of people moved to cities, increasing the spread of disease. (…)

As global climate change produces more extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and flooding, spikes in the prevalence of other weather sensitive diseases can be expected. Furthermore, deforestation, a major contributor to global warming, has brought animals and ticks in contact with humans, resulting in the emergence of a new infectious illness, Lyme’s Disease, first reported in 1975. Global warming is projected to expand the range of ticks that carry this disease.

The earth’s water supply has also been profoundly affected by global warming, endangering the health of people and the planet. Water is essential to all aspects of life, yet 99% of water on Earth is unsafe or unavailable to drink. As a result of global warming, water will become even more scarce and contaminated as climate patterns change, extreme weather events occur, and glaciers melt. The 20th century has witnessed the greatest increase in temperature of any century in the past thousand years, bringing with it a change in precipitation patterns and a rise in sea levels. Global sea levels rose at an average rate of 0.07 inches per year from 1961-2003 (rising at an even greater rate of 0.12 inches per year on average from 1993-2003) reducing fresh water availability and elevating water temperatures that threaten already scarce water supplies. (…)

Changes to the earth’s water supply have threatened populations around the globe with new diseases and sanitation concerns. 1.1 billion people worldwide lack safe drinking water and 2.6 billion people do not have access to adequate sanitation infrastructure. In the United States alone, more than 750,000 cases of diseases associated with unsafe drinking water occurred between 1980 and 1996.

{ Huffington Post | Continue reading }

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

{ James Joyce, Ulysses }

Illustration { Superman is a… }

{ Merlin Bronques }

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit, Michigan, to Louisville, Kentucky.

Water providers rarely disclose results of pharmaceutical screenings, unless pressed, the AP found. (…)

How do the drugs get into the water?

People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.

{ AP/CNN | Continue reading | NY Times }

photo { Zena Holloway }

All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc.

All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth.

{ Dan Phiffer }

Snowflakes are symmetrical because they reflect the internal order of the water molecules as they arrange themselves in the solid state (the process of crystallization). (…)

The growth of snowflakes (or of any substance changing from a liquid to a solid state) is known as crystallization. During this process, the molecules (in this case, water molecules) align themselves to maximize attractive forces and minimize repulsive ones. As a result, the water molecules arrange themselves in predetermined spaces and in a specific arrangement. This process is much like tiling a floor in accordance with a specific pattern: once the pattern is chosen and the first tiles are placed, then all the other tiles must go in predetermined spaces in order to maintain the pattern of symmetry. Water molecules simply arrange themselves to fit the spaces and maintain symmetry; in this way, the different arms of the snowflake are formed.

There are many different types of snowflakes (as in the cliché that ‘no two snowflakes are alike’); this differentiation occurs because each snowflake is a separate crystal that is subject to the specific atmospheric conditions, notably temperature and humidity, under which it is formed.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

photos { Snow Crystal Photo Gallery | Magnified snowflake }

With water becoming increasingly precious in California, a rising number of farmers figure they can make more money by selling their water than by actually growing something.

Because farmers get their water at subsidized rates, some of them see financial opportunity this year in selling their allotments to Los Angeles and other desperately thirsty cities across Southern California, as well as to other farms.

“It just makes dollars and sense right now,” said Bruce Rolen, a third-generation farmer who grows rice, wheat and other crops in Northern California’s lush Sacramento Valley.

Instead of sowing in April, Rolen plans to let 100 of his 250 acres of white rice lie fallow and sell his irrigation water on the open market, where it could fetch up to three times the normal price.

What effect these deals will have on produce prices remains to be seen, because the negotiations are still going on and it is not yet clear how many acres will be taken out of production. But California grows most of the nation’s winter vegetables and about 80 percent of the world’s almonds, and is the No. 2 rice state, behind Arkansas.

{ AP/Google | Continue reading }

artwork { Tony Feher, installation view at Chinati Foundation, Stable Building, Marfa, Texas, 2005-06 }

Let’s say you’re alone on a raft in the middle of the South Pacific, with no fresh water to speak of. What would happen to you if you drank seawater?

The answer is that we only need a small amount of salt to live. According to the Salt Institute (a non-profit association of salt producers, founded in 1914), the recommended daily dose is around 500 mg/day–around a quarter of a teaspoonful. The optimal amount of salt varies based on the person’s lifestyle, genetic makeup and geographic location (basically, all factors that affect how often and how much you sweat). Most Americans consume much more than they need, around 3500 mg/day. (…)

Take a lot of salt into your body and your metabolism very quickly goes into crisis. From every cell, water molecules rush off like so many voluntary firemen to try to dilute and carry off the sudden intake of salt. This leaves the cells dangerously short of the water they need to carry out their normal functions. They become, in a word, dehydrated. In extreme situations, dehydration will lead to seizures, unconsciousness, and brain damage. Meanwhile, the overworked blood cells carry the salt to the kidneys, which eventually become overwhelmed and shut down. Without functioning kidneys you die.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }