Most of us have heard it a hundred times: drink eight glasses of water a day to stay healthy and hydrated. And while hydration is genuinely important for our health, if you’re guzzling all that water with your meals it can actually have a negative impact on your digestion.

It’s true that the entire digestive system works more efficiently when it’s well-hydrated, but this doesn’t mean it should be flooded with cold water right when it’s working to digest your last meal. Too much water during meals can interfere with natural levels of acid and bile needed in the stomach to properly digest your food. In particular, too much cold water during meals can slow digestion and may cause cramping in sensitive individuals. Read more

As the male túngara frog serenades female frogs from a pond, he creates watery ripples that make him easier to target by rivals and predators such as bats, according to researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), Leiden University and Salisbury University.

Ripples continue for several seconds after a male tungara frog has stopped calling.

A túngara frog will stop calling if it sees a bat overhead, but ripples continue moving for several seconds after the call ceases. In the study, published this week in the journal Science, researchers found evidence that bats use echolocation — a natural form of sonar — to detect these ripples and home in on a frog. The discovery sheds light on an ongoing evolutionary arms race between frogs and bats. Read more

Inspiration can come in many forms, but this one truly was a breath of fresh air. A group of McMaster researchers has solved the problem of cumbersome, expensive and painfully slow water-testing by turning the process upside-down.

Instead of shipping water to the lab, they have created a way to take the lab to the water, putting potentially life-saving technology into the hands of everyday people. The team has reduced the sophisticated chemistry required for testing water safety to a simple pill, by adapting technology found in a dissolving breath strip. Want to know if a well is contaminated? Drop a pill in a vial of water and shake vigorously. If the colour changes, there’s the answer. Read more

Researchers at UPM are working in the development of hydrocarbons early detection devices for rivers in order to prevent contamination that could seriously affect the environment.

Oil fluorescence produced by an ultraviolet LED.

The new devices use ultraviolet LED as light source that detects contaminant substances thanks to a fluorescence method. This can result in many benefits compared to the current systems due to the development of faster, robust and affordable detection systems. These new devices will be useful for the search of potential dangerous substances present in continental waters, all this according to researchers of the Telecommunication School of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), who are currently studying its viability. Read more

Many Americans are confused about the best ways to conserve water and have a slippery grasp on how much water different activities use, according to a national online survey conducted by an Indiana University researcher.

Experts say the best strategy for conserving water is to focus on efficiency improvements such as replacing toilets and retrofitting washing machines. However, the largest group of the participants, nearly 43 percent, cited taking shorter showers, which does save water but may not be the most effective action. Very few participants cited replacing toilets or flushing less, even though toilets use the most volume of water daily.

The results of the survey of 1,020 participants are detailed in the article “Perceptions of Water Use” by author Shahzeen Attari, an assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs. The article appears the week of March 3 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read more