WebProNews

Tag: Water

  • The Latest in Water Trends

    The Latest in Water Trends

    Water is the most important resource on the planet. We use water for almost all aspects of life from cooking, to cleaning, to bathing, and most importantly: for drinking. But do we really know what’s in the water that we drink? Less than .5% of the water on Earth is drinkable. Much of it is being wasted every day. With such a small amount of drinkable water, are we sure that everything we are drinking is completely clean? Let’s learn more about current water trends.

    Contamination in Our Water

    Unfortunately, 1 of 5 Americans have been exposed to contaminated drinking water in the past 10 years. Some of the most common contaminants are nitrates, arsenic, and microorganisms. Microorganisms can include bacteria and viruses that can cause widespread illness in humans. Contaminated water can spread diseases such as cholera and dysentery and waterborne illnesses cause over 6,000 deaths every year in the US.

    Aside from the tragedy that waterborne illnesses can bring, the cost of these illnesses totals over $3 billion a year! This cost comes directly from a loss of water sanitation. It can easily be solved with mainstream products in the US. Clearly we want our water supply to be as clean as possible, so can we accomplish that?

    Filtering water is the best way to ensure that the water that is coming straight from the tap hasn’t been contaminated by anything. Filters can remove 99.99% of bacteria as well as 99.99% of viruses. This makes the risk of infection from contaminated drinking water significantly less. Filtered water also removes over 200 other contaminants such as fluoride or debris from pipes. 

    Much Water is Wasted

    Water is such an important part of our lives. It’s surprising how much is wasted. With contaminants in water, it would seem that consumers would try and save as much clean water as possible, but this is not the case. Americans use an average of 82 gallons of water every day. This number comes from water used for bathing, cooking, cleaning, and drinking, our taps are always running! 

    Using water filtration systems, water usage can be cut down. Since the filter is filled one time, it doesn’t have to be filled again. Filtration systems also come in a range of sizes to accommodate any consumer’s needs. Filters can be portable and easy to travel with, or hold up to six gallons to host a number of people! This wide variety of sizes makes it so that consumers can make sure that no matter the occasion, they can readily have a supply of clean drinking water. 

    In Conclusion

    Water is integral to our lives. There is a limited amount of water that is drinkable on the planet. We must make sure to minimize the water that is wasted. It is also important to make sure that the water that we are drinking is clean and safe, and this is all possible through the use of water filtration systems. Learn more about water filtration systems in the infographic below: 

    Water is Life Infographic by BerkeyFilters.com

  • Bill Gates Makes Jimmy Fallon Drink Poop Water (His Words!)

    You know the scene from The Princess Bride where Westley and Vizzini try to outsmart each other as to who’s going to drink the poisoned wine? Yeah, you know the one.

    Remember how it went down?

    Well, Bill Gates basically pulled a Westley on The Tonight Show and tricked Jimmy Fallon into drinking poop water (THEY WERE BOTH POISONED, AHA!).

    In other news, Bill Gates is officially calling it “poop water” now. Check it out:

    If you’re confused as to why anyone is drinking poop water, check here. Basically, the billionaire head of The Gates Foundation has put his weight behind an interesting project – an “ingenious” machine called the Omniprocessor, which takes solid waste and turns it into electricity, clean water, and a little bit of ash.

    Image via The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, YouTube

  • Bill Gates Samples from Machine That Turns Poop to Water, Electricity

    “I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin. They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water.”

    That’s the word from Bill Gates, who you’re about to see drink a tall glass of poop – well, water that was poop five minutes prior.

    The billionaire head of The Gates Foundation has just detailed one of its most interesting projects – an “ingenious” machine called the Omniprocessor, which was designed by Janicki Bioenergy. The Omniprocessor takes solid waste and turns it into electricity, clean water, and a little bit of ash.

    “Through the ingenious use of a steam engine, it produces more than enough energy to burn the next batch of waste. In other words, it powers itself, with electricity to spare. The next-generation processor, more advanced than the one I saw, will handle waste from 100,000 people, producing up to 86,000 liters of potable water a day and a net 250 kw of electricity,” says Gates.

    Cool. But why do we need to turn human waste into water?

    “Because a shocking number of people, at least 2 billion, use latrines that aren’t properly drained. Others simply defecate out in the open. The waste contaminates drinking water for millions of people, with horrific consequences: Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically,” says Gates.

    Access to clean water, proper sanitation, and reliable electricity is far from a given in many parts of the world. The Omniprocessor solves all of these problems. Gates says it could be “many years” before this machine is getting wide usage, but he’s excited about it.

    Image via thegatesnotes, YouTube

  • Lake Mead Water Levels Dangerously Low

    Lake Mead Water Levels Dangerously Low

    Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States, but Lake Mead is low, and that has some folks worried.

    Lake Mead was formed by the Hoover Dam, and sits between Nevada and Arizona. It is 112 miles long and supplies water to much of the Southwestern United States.

    Lake Mead is nearing an all-time low. While that may sound shocking, it should also be noted that Mead has not been at full capacity since 1983, partly due to water demand, but also due to climate and weather factors.

    What happens if Mead continues to go low? Might some water deliveries end up stopping?

    “The first thing you would do is you would stop agriculture deliveries,” Bob Barrett, a spokesman for the Central Arizona Project said. “You can stop growing cotton but you can’t stop growing people. Agriculture would have to go back to groundwater.”

    Arizona has been storing water underground, and could continue to make deliveries for some time.

    “We would start extracting the water we’ve been storing underground, put it into the canals and make our deliveries,” Barrett said.

    Scientists studied the potential effect of low levels in Lake Mead back in 2008. One study from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at UC San Diego reported that there is a 50 percent chance Lake Mead, a key source of water for millions of people in the southwestern United States, will be dry by 2021 if climate changes as expected and future water usage is not curtailed.

    “We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us,” said physicist Tim Barnett. “Make no mistake, this water problem is not a scientific abstraction, but rather one that will impact each and every one of us that live in the Southwest.”

    “Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system. The alternative to reasoned solutions to this coming water crisis is a major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest; something that will affect each of us living in the region,” the report concluded.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Google Adds Beautiful Street View Imagery Of Endangered Colorado River

    Google has partnered with American Rivers to bring imagery of the Colorado River to Street View. Take a look at some of the beautiful scenery:

    “For 6 million years, the Colorado River has flowed through the heart of the desert southwest, its waters slowly carving out a canyon so vast it can be seen from space—yet so remote it didn’t appear on early maps of the region,” says Chris Williams, Senior Vice President of Conservation for American Rivers, in a guest post on the Google Maps blog. “It wasn’t until 1869, when John Wesley Powell led a small exploration party on a rafting trip, that the natural wonders of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon came fully into view.”

    Part of the reason the new imagery exists is to raise awareness about the need for the river’s restoration and protection.

    “While you admire its grandeur, remember that the river is also at risk,” writes Williams. “One of the United States’ most important resources, the Colorado River provides drinking water for 36 million people from Denver to Los Angeles, supports a $26 billion recreation industry, and irrigates nearly 4 million acres of land that grow 15 percent of our nation’s crops. But it’s also one of the most endangered, dammed, diverted and plumbed rivers in the world, thanks to a century of management policies and practices that have promoted the use of Colorado River water at an unsustainable rate. By the time it reaches the Gulf of California in Mexico, the river is barely a trickle—a ghost of its once magnificent self. You can see evidence of the river’s decline In Street View, like the high water mark (showing 1950s driftwood on top of the rock), or sedimentation along the river’s edge down by Lake Mead.”

    In terms of simply adding to the beautiful imagery that Google has amassed for Street View, this will go nicely with the Grand Canyon imagery it released last year as the result of an early Trekker outing.

    Last week, Google also announced that it will soon have underwater imagery for Sydney, Australia, and debuted more Street View imagery from Hawaii.

    Images via Google

  • Maui Shark Attack Kills Fisherman

    Maui Shark Attack Kills Fisherman

    A shark attack in Maui resulted in the death of a kayak fisherman whose foot was severed in the attack. The fisherman, who has been identified by the Maui County Police Department as Patrick Briney Stevenson, was reported to have been fishing with a partner at the time of his attack.

    Briney’s fishing partner allegedly spotted a nearby boat from which he sought help. Briney was taken ashore by the boat and then to a hospital where he was later pronounced dead.  According to CNN,  William Dunaway was one of the passengers of the boat that helped to transport Briney’s body. Dunaway reported what he says he witnessed of the incident:

    “We noticed in the distance there was a man in a kayak that was waving to us, and he started paddling over to us. We saw that he was tethered to another kayak. And as he got closer we saw that there was a body lying flat out in the kayak and the body didn’t look good. It had a very odd tint to it, and I think we all realized that there was something wrong.”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VacKx9s7q4w

    While shark attacks have been greatly feared (especially since the production of Jaws), marine scientists have always worked hard to assure the public that shark attacks are typically rare and few in number.

    But little consolation comes to those who frequent the waters as well as those who do not, due to the highly televised stories of the most grizzly shark attacks, such as the attack suffered by pro-surfer Bethany Hamilton back in 2003. Hamilton was only 13 years old when she lost her arm to a tiger shark during a morning surf at Tunnels Beach in Kauai.

    And this year, Hawaii has been more shark-infested than usual with a total of 13 shark attacks recorded. Of the 13 incidents, Maui makes up the majority of these attacks with what is being counted now as its eighth attack this year.

    The chairman of the Department of Land and Natural Resources William J. Aila has announced measures toward finding the reason for the increase in shark attacks happening around Hawaii:

    “We are not sure why these bites are occurring more frequently than normal, especially around Maui. That’s why we are conducting a two-year study of shark behavior around Maui that may give us better insights.”

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

    Video and via Youtube

  • Victoria Falls Plunge: Chinese Tourist Survives 49-Feet Leap

    Yesterday, a Chinese tourist’s trip to Victoria Falls in Zambia took a turn for the worst.

    While capturing photos of the massive falls, 45-year-old Wang Shun Xue lost his footing and plunged 49 feet into the gorge.

    According to the manager of the National Heritage Conservation Commission in Livingstone, John Zulu mentioned how fortunately Xue didn’t fall at a location where the outcome could have been a lot more fatal.

    “The depth of the gorge is 25 meters but where he fell from, it’s about 15 meters because some places there are slopes,” he told AFP.

    A rock miraculously embraced his fall. Xue suffered only minor injuries including a bruise to the arm.

    Xue was taken to a local clinic and then caught a plane to leave the country.

    Victoria Falls, located on the Zambezi River, is a 354 feet dive into blinding water, sharp rocks and crocodiles. As a popular hot spot for tourists, the waterfall runs between Zambia and Zimbabwe.

    Although Xue’s survival appears to be astonishing, there have been others before him who have also defeated death at Victoria Falls.

    In 2012 on New Year’s Eve, 22-year-old Australian tourist, Erin Langworthy, bungee jumped straight into the Zambezi River after her cord snapped loose. She recovered after a week in a South African hospital.

    Here is a video showing Langworthy’s near-death plunge.

     

     Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

  • Astronaut Wrings Out Water Aboard the ISS, Proving That Even Mundane Tasks Are Awesome in Space

    Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Chris Hadfield is awesome, space is awesome, and everything he does in space is awesome. Proving once again that even the most mundane tasks are transformed into something incredible when performed in zero gravity, here’s Hadfield wringing out a soaking-wet washcloth aboard the ISS.

    Not only is the wringing-out part cool, but so is the whole getting-it-wet-in-the-first-place part.

    If this isn’t reason enough to find space programs, I don’t know what is.

  • Middle East Freshwater Reserves Declining, Shows Study

    Middle East Freshwater Reserves Declining, Shows Study

    A new study has shown that much of the Middle East lost freshwater reserves over the past decade.

    The study, to be published this week in the journal Water Resources Research, was based on data from NASA‘s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. The findings show that, starting in 2003, parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins lost 144 cubic kilometers (117 million acre feet) of stored freshwater – nearly the same about of water found in the Dead Sea.

    “GRACE data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India,” said Jay Famiglietti, principle investigator of the study and a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine. “The rate was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws.”

    The GRACE satellites measure water reserves using gravitational measurements. Since the level of water reserves alters the Earth’s mass, the satellites can precisely measure local gravitational effects to estimate a region’s change in water reserves.

    The study blames around 60% of the loss to the pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs. Around another 20% was attributed to soil drying and snowpack shrinkage. The final one-fifth was attributed to the loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs.

    “The Middle East just does not have that much water to begin with, and it’s a part of the world that will be experiencing less rainfall with climate change,” said Famiglietti. “Those dry areas are getting dryer. The Middle East and the world’s other arid regions need to manage available water resources as best they can.”

  • Huge South Pole Moon Crater Could Hold Frozen Water

    The moon still holds some mysteries. One of those being whether or not there is any discernible amount of ice on the surface. While we have been to the moon, we have only visited a very small area. The way of knowing without actually going there are hit and miss too. For instance, the Japanese spacecraft Kaguya saw no discernible signs of ice within Shackleton Crater, but NASA’s LCROSS probe analyzed Cabeus Crater near the moon’s south pole and found it measured as much as 5 percent water by mass.

    The way they check this is by having a spacecraft illuminate the interior of the crater with infrared laser light, measuring how reflective it was. The scan of The crater’s floor was more reflective than that of other nearby craters, suggesting it had ice. “Water ice in amounts of up to 20 percent is a viable possibility,” study lead author Maria Zuber told SPACE.com. Don’t get your hopes up, though she cautioned. The amount of ice in Shackleton Crater “can also be much less, conceivably as little as zero.”

    Zuber noted that the measurements only look at a micron-thick portion of Shackleton Crater’s uppermost layer. “A bigger question is how much water might be buried at depth,” Zuber said, adding that NASA’s GRAIL mission will investigate that possibility. And with that possibility we get the reality of a permanent base on the moon. If there is water in massive amounts, which some suspect there could be. We would have the ability to make rocket fuel and potable water for human settlement.

  • Google Conserves Water And Cools Servers At The Same Time

    Greenpeace really likes Google and their commitment to using more efficient ways to power their data centers across the country. I’m sure the conservation group would also be delighted by Google’s recycled water cooling system.

    Jim Brown, Google’s Data Center Facilities Manager, posted today on the company’s blog about how they use water from the Chattanoochee River in Georgia to cool their data center in a unique way. The Chattanoochee River is a large river that begins in the northern part of Georgia, runs through Atlanta and then empties out into the Gulf of Mexico.

    Anyway, Brown says that Google cools their data centers with half the energy normally required by using a technique called free cooling. They do this by bringing cold water into the data center to cool their servers then release it as water vapor through cooling towers.

    Google used to make use of Douglas County’s clean drinking water to cool their servers when the data center first opened in 2007. Soon after, they struck a deal with the county to let them use reuse water instead. This allowed them to use 100 percent recycled water for all of their cooling needs.

    It’s get way cooler than that though. Google and the county built a side-stream water plant about five miles west of the county’s main water plant. This allows them to divert up to 30 percent of reuse water to their data center for cooling. What’s left of the water after cooling their servers is treated onsite and released back into the river as clean water.

    Google also released a video showing the inner workings of their Douglas County cooling facility.

  • Garrett McNamara: I Have Underwater Superpowers

    Garrett McNamara is a world record holder for surfing the biggest wave in the world. The wave, which stood a gigantic 90 feet, is a monster in itself, but Garrett feels he can break his old record.

    http://youtu.be/nd2jtwviyC8

    Garrett has a special suit that allows him to breath underwater. On the suit lies a special pouch that can be filled with oxygen, once underwater he can then breathe that oxygen through a built in straw. McNamara tells a source that he is currently looking to break his current behemoth of a record with an even better suit; he says he’s hunting for a 120-footer in Portugal.

    The same source asked McNamara how he survived to which he simply replied “I don’t”.