Aral Sea

The Aral Sea is the poster child for large, dried-up bodies of water. If you travel to the Aral Sea, which sits on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, you’ll find a disconnected collection of small ponds of sea water sitting in a dusty bowl that held what used to be one large body of water.

The Aral Sea, which is technically a lake, has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s when the Soviet Union began to divert rivers that feed the Aral Sea for agricultural irrigation. With the receding waters went a large fishing industry, leaving high rates of unemployment and fishing boats left to dry on the former shoreline.

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Bone dry

One of the problems with having a population as large as 6 billion people (and rising) is that it takes a lot of water to keep everything running. We use water to drink, make food, create energy, manufacture products, extract raw minerals from the Earth and everything else in between.

The average family of four can use 400 gallons of indoor water or more every day, to say nothing of the massive quantities of water used by businesses, farms and industry. The driver of our civilization, electricity, is generated by turbines using massive amounts of water; about half of the total water use in the U.S. is by power plants. Read more

 “Water composes half to four-fifths of you, depending on how much body fat you have. It makes up about 85 percent of your brain, 80 percent of your blood, and 70 percent of your lean muscle. The human body, like all living organisms, survives by means of an ongoing flow of energy. You are an engine, and water is your fuel, coolant, and lubricant. Water keeps you running,” states Suzanne Winckler in the UC Davis publication Groundwater.

Generally, health-conscious folks are well aware of the importance of proper hydration. And yet, with so many options for water purification and enhancement, the question remains – which water is best? Read more

Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have created a tractor beam on water, providing a radical new technique that could confine oil spills, manipulate floating objects or explain rips at the beach.

Dr. Horst Punzmann and professor Michael Shats demonstrate their water tractor beam.

The group, led by Professor Michael Shats discovered they can control water flow patterns with simple wave generators, enabling them to move floating objects at will.

“We have figured out a way of creating waves that can force a floating object to move against the direction of the wave,” said Dr Horst Punzmann, from the Research School of Physics and Engineering, who led the project. Read more

Americans everywhere are encouraged to drink half their body weight in fluid ounces in water each day or the proverbial eight eight-ounce glasses of water per day. Is it too much? Is it not enough? For answers, we turn to some basic aspects of human physiology. While water may seem perfectly pure and natural, you can “clearly” have too much of a good thing, and the side effects can be surprisingly nasty, and include numerous signs to look out for.

We often hear that our bodies are made up mostly of water. While this is true, it is only a half truth, and it certainly isn’t justification for blindly chugging as much water as you can stomach each day. In reality, the “water” in our bodies is not much like the water coming out of our faucets, found in bottles of Fiji, or coming out of home filters or distillers. The “water” in our bodies is more like soup, or seawater, or milk. Read more