Water is essential for all socio-economic development and for maintaining healthy ecosystems. As population increases and development calls for increased allocations of groundwater and surface water for the domestic, agriculture and industrial sectors, the pressure on water resources intensifies, leading to tensions, conflicts among users, and excessive pressure on the environment. The increasing stress on freshwater resources brought about by ever rising demand and profligate use, as well as by growing pollution worldwide, is of serious concern.

What is water scarcity? Imbalances between availability and demand, the degradation of groundwater and surface water quality, intersectoral competition, interregional and international conflicts, all contributes to water scarcity.

Scarcity often has its roots in water shortage, and it is in the arid and semiarid regions affected by droughts and wide climate variability, combined with population growth and economic development, that the problems of water scarcity are most acute. Read more

You must have heard that drinking plenty of water promotes healthier life; but have you heard about weight loss benefits offered by water? The following article throws light on the relationship between ‘drinking water and weight loss’. Read on to know various uses of water…

Body cells function well when they are provided with ample amounts of water. Only a well-hydrated body can function efficiently. Water enables the glands and the organs in the body to work properly and quickly. All chemical processes occurring within the body involve energy metabolism. Drinking plenty of water helps boost your metabolic rate and make you feel more energetic. Increased metabolic rate results in weight loss. This is the simple explanation for water and weight loss myth. Read more

Surface Ocean Currents

An ocean current can be defined as a horizontal movement of seawater in the ocean. Ocean currents are driven by the circulation of wind above surface waters, interacting with evaporation, sinking of water at high latitudes, and the Coriolis force generated by the earth’s rotation. Frictional stress at the interface between the ocean and the wind causes the water to move in the direction of the wind.

Ocean Circulation Conveyor Belt. The ocean plays a major role in the distribution of the planet’s heat through deep sea circulation. This simplified illustration shows this

Large surface ocean currents are a response of the atmosphere and ocean to the flow of energy from the tropics to polar regions. In some cases, currents are transient features and affect only a small area. Other ocean currents are essentially permanent and extend over large horizontal distances.

On a global scale, large ocean currents are constrained by the continental masses found bordering the three oceanic basins. Continental borders cause these currents to develop an almost closed circular pattern called a gyre. Each ocean basin has a large gyre located at approximately 30° North and one at 30° South latitude in the subtropical regions. The currents in these gyres are driven by the atmospheric flow produced by the subtropical high pressure systems. Smaller gyres occur in the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans centered at 50° North. Currents in these systems are propelled by the circulation produced by polar low pressure centers. In the Southern Hemisphere, these gyre systems do not develop because of the lack of constraining land masses. Read more

“Water, not unlike religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people. Since the very birth of human civilization, people have moved to settle close to water. People move when there is too little of it; people move when there is too much of it. People move on it. People write and sing and dance and dream about it.

People fight over it. And everybody, everywhere and every day, needs it. We need water for drinking, for cooking, for washing, for food, for industry, for energy, for transport, for rituals, for fun, for life. And it is not only we humans who need it; all life is dependent upon water for its very survival.” Mikhail Gorbachev in 2003

Water is becoming more and more a scarce and valuable resource as population and consumption rise. Many human factors influence the availability of water, including dams or other engineering, population, and consumerism – or our water use on an individual, business, and government levels. Evaluation of these factors, as well as technology and action to support healthy water supplies, is necessary to gain control of the situation. Read more

The Namib Desert beetle lives in an area that only gets half an inch of rainfall per year, and so it draws 12 percent of its weight in water from the air to quench its thirst.

NBD Nano co-founder Deckard Sorensen was inspired by the beetle to the point that he conceptualized a self-filling water bottle, which he hopes to bring to the market by 2014.

Every morning, the beetle climbs to the top of a sand dune, faces away from the wind, and ensures that water condenses in hydrophilic areas of its back. The water then flows to a storage area in the beetle.

To mimic nature, Sorenson layered a surface with hydrophilic and hydrophobic coatings, used a fan to pass air over the surface, and managed to get water to condense. This eventually led to the design of a conceptual self-filling water bottle. Read more