Some readers may recall a science class in which an excitable teacher walked to the front of the class to show off a small, cracked steel container, seemingly damaged by an incredibly powerful, but tiny force; only for said teacher to reveal that the damage had been done by nothing more than water. However, what would happen if you put the water in a container it couldn’t break out of and then froze it?
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One of the ironies of CES, hosted here in Las Vegas, is that the largest and perhaps most spectacular gadget we could all be covering is nearly 80 years old, weighs 6.6 million tons, and supplies much of the electricity fueling the devices on display at the trade show.
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Water’s normally an excellent remedy for fires. But aboard the International Space Station, astronauts are investigating a novel form of water that actually starts fires. It’s called "supercritical water," and it could revolutionize terrestrial trash disposal.
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California’s running out of water. This year’s record-breaking drought—coming after two already dry years—has the state scrambling for the liquid stuff. Plans to seed clouds for extra snowfall are already in place. But do we really require storm clouds for water? Why not use fog?
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Amsterdam is known for a lot of things, including their scenic canals. The city’s Canal District is turning 400 this year, and the city is celebrating by selling bottles of water obtained from the canal.
It’s an unusual souvenir but hey, at least it lets you take an actual piece (or rather, several hundred milliliters) of the attraction with you, complete with sediment. The water is bottled as Amsterdam Canal Aqua and has the background story of the waterway printed on the back of its label.
It’s obviously not potable, so don’t drink it if you know what’s good for you.
Each bottle of Amsterdam Canal Aqua is priced at €50 (~$69 USD.)
[via PSFK via Food Beast]
With a breakthrough that will hopefully eventually trickle down to tea kettles, coffee machines, and even showerheads, researchers at the Hamburg Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Germany have devised a way to boil water to 600 degrees celsius in less than a trillionth of a second. To put that into perspective, as the folks at DESY point out, one picasecond is to a second what one second is to 32,000 years.
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For the first time ever, the Hubble Space Telescope has observed water plumes on the icy crust of Europa. The Jovian moon is one of the most likely worlds to contain life in the Solar System. According to Lorenz Roth—who headed the team that made the discovery—"this is tremendously exciting." No kidding.
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As earth’s population surges, mankind faces an increasingly limited supply of fresh water. Thankfully, Australian scientists report this week that they’ve found vast new fresh water supplies. Unfortunately, it’s in one of earth’s least accessible places: under the ocean floor
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The incredibly lifelike computer simulations of snow
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I’ve seen Earth compared to all its water
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