Some 300,000 West Virginians have endured severe water restrictions thanks to a chemical spill in the Elk River, triggering an ongoing environmental investigation.

Al Jones of the West Virginia Department of General Services tests the water in a restroom in Charleston’s State Capitol on January 13, 2014.

Although the 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCMH) spilled into the river is not a typical environmental contaminant, the 5,000 gallons lost in the incident have lessons to teach, say experts, about our vulnerable and aging water infrastructure.

To find out more, National Geographic spoke with Tom Curtis, the deputy executive director of the American Water Works Association, a water industry trade group based in Washington, D.C. Read more

“I’ve come to realize that if we were going to take just one step to make ourselves and our families healthier, probably the single best thing we could do is to simply drink more water,” First Lady Michelle Obama said in a statement issued this week. She went on to recommend downing an additional glass a day.

Brainerd High School football players drink water to stay hydrated during practice in hot weather.

Which raises the question: How many glasses of water a day should you drink?

It’s commonly believed that eight 8-ounce glasses of water should be guzzled each day. You sure won’t get any arguments about that from the bottled water industry. But hydration experts aren’t sure where the “8 x 8” rule came from—or whether it holds water. Read more

Reddit users are going crazy about the giant river otter (Pteronura brasiliensis)—an Amazonian giant that can reach up to six feet (1.8 meters) long. That’s more than twice as long as a North American river otter—arguably with double the coolness.

Here are seven facts you otter know about this South American member of the Mustelidae family.

1. The first ever giant river otter cub born in Asia arrived at Wildlife Reserves Singapore just this last August, UPI reports. Dr. Cheng Wen-Huar, WRS’s chief life sciences officer, was quoted as saying, “With increasing threats such as habitat destruction and poaching, captive breeding programs play a pivotal role in conserving threatened species for our future generations.” You can see a newborn member of the next generation looking impossibly cute here on ZooBorns. Read more

Sunday March 23, 2014, at a little after 8 am, the gates at Morelos Dam on the Mexico-Arizona border were opened for the first time in history for the purpose of allowing the Colorado River to flow downstream into its delta to water the plants and animals that live there.  A crowd of more than 100, many from the local community, plus a handful of reporters and water workers from afar, waited just downstream.

A cheer went up when the water began to pour down, first in a trickle, and then a steady gushing flow.  It took a long time for the institutions that manage the Colorado River to make this happen.  Now we have the chance to see how long it takes the river to move downstream, and how far it goes. (See “Historic ‘Pulse Flow’ Brings Water to Parched Colorado River Delta.”)

Later in the day, after some excellent adobada tacos, a few of us drove downriver to look for the front of the flow. We found it about 18 river miles below the dam, cool and clear. A lot of the flow is soaking into the parched, sandy channel, and downstream progress is slow but steady. The water was cool and clear. Read more

Once the fourth largest lake in the world, Central Asia’s shrinking Aral Sea has reached a new low, thanks to decades-old water diversions for irrigation and a more recent drought. Satellite imagery released this week by NASA shows that the eastern basin of the freshwater body is now completely dry.

In 2000 (left), Asia’s Aral Sea had already shrunk to a fraction of its 1960 extent (black line). Further irrigation and dry conditions in 2014 (right) caused the sea’s eastern lobe to completely dry up for the first time in 600 years.

“It is likely the first time it has completely dried in 600 years, since medieval desiccation associated with diversion of Amu Darya [river] to the Caspian Sea,” Philip Micklin, an Aral Sea expert and a geographer emeritus from Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, told NASA about the sea’s eastern basin. (See “Photos: Dried Up Aral Sea Aftermath.”) Read more