COVID-19 Highlights Lack of Clean Water Access
The need for good hygiene during the COVID-19 pandemic is highlighting the lack of access to clean water some communities are facing.
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Surfers Pick Up the Slack to Monitor Water
A massive network of surfers and citizen scientists is monitoring water quality and water contamination in places governments don’t.
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Could Agriculture Save US Water Supply?
By Mackenzie Myers This article is part of a series about key science policy issues. Please use these articles to become an informed voter, ask political candidates about the issues, and put every candidate on record about science. This time of year in California’s Central Valley, it’s easy to see where the Golden State gets its nickname. Golden sun shines on golden grasses of rolling golden hills, parched after so many months without rain, which is unlikely to return for at least several more weeks. Even so, there are signs…
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Protect Local Waterways with the EarthEcho Water Challenge
By Sean Russell On March 22, this year’s EarthEcho Water Challenge kicked off, empowering young people and community members around the world to monitor and protect local water resources in their communities. Initiated in 2003 as the World Water Monitoring Challenge (in celebration of the U.S. Clean Water Act), this year-round, global program is designed to connect anyone, of any age, to their local water resources through water quality monitoring. Participants share their water quality data through the global EarthEcho Water Challenge online database, contributing to our understanding of the…
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Learning Where Water Comes From, With Isotopes
by Nicholas Dove and Alyssa Abbey Did you ever wonder where your water is coming from? For many of us, drinking a glass of water is as easy as turning on the tap. But, the journey of water from a single raindrop to your drinking glass starts long before then. Water can actually travel hundreds of miles or take hundreds of years before it finally reaches you. During this hot summer month of July, The Biota Project is exploring the origins of one of Earth’s most precious resources: water. We…
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Empowering Communities to Examine Lead Exposure with Crowd the Tap
By Bradley Allf Lead pipes for transporting water have been a fixture of modern civilization for more than two thousand years. Ancient Romans channeled water into homes and bathhouses through lead piping. In fact, the Latin word for lead, plumbum, is where we get the English word “plumbing.” Yet we have also long recognized that lead can have a serious impact on our health. Vitrivius, who lived during the first century BCE, wrote at length about the physical harm caused by lead exposure, concluding that “water should therefore on no…
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Pharmaceutical Waste Damages Aquatic Ecosystems
By Shayna Keyles, @shaynakeyles In a society where nearly 70 percent take at least one prescription drug and the pharmaceutical and biochemical industries spend billions of dollars each year to create new products, it is no surprise that a large amount of pharmaceutical wastewater is produced each year. But what happens to this waste, and what impact does it have on our environment? In early 2014, researchers with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) surveyed 59 headstreams in the US Piedmont ecoregion to answer just those questions. These streams were…
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