Everyone’s had a disaster during which a few drops of water render a computer all but useless. But what if the computer was water to begin with? Scientists at Stanford University have developed just that — a new kind of computer that runs on water droplets with the help of H2O’s unique physical properties.

It’s taken nearly a decade to develop the computer, the team notes in a release, and to understand just what it does you’ll have to put your traditional idea of a computer on hold. Rather than serve up news or run games, the new computer manipulates physical matter at a very small scale. Read more

It’s easy to look at a portrait of Earth and think of our home as a water planet. After all, 75 percent of the surface is covered with water. But the thin skin of liquid that surrounds our rocky home is misleading—if you took all the water on the planet and bunched it into a ball, that ball would be less than half the diameter of the Moon. That’s not a huge amount of water.

Plus, the proportion of water that humans can use for daily use is actually pretty small. Most of the world’s water is saltwater in the oceans. Only about three percent of the water is fresh. Half of that is locked in glaciers, the polar ice caps and snow.

Almost all of the rest flows through the world’s lakes, streams, rivers, soils and groundwater. A tiny percentage is water vapor in the atmosphere, driving our weather and climate. That doesn’t leave much for the 7 billion people on the planet, and even less for some populations because all that water isn’t evenly Read more

Morning dew and roaring falls inspire poets. Hurricanes and typhoons wreak devastation. Melting glaciers and rising tides challenge us all, even in an ever more thirsty world.

Water is so vital to our survival, but strangely enough, we don’t know the first thing about it—literally the first. Where does water, a giver and taker of life on planet Earth, come from? When I was in junior high school, my science teacher taught us about the water cycle—evaporation from oceans and lakes, condensation forming clouds , rain refilling oceans and lakes—and it all made sense. Read more

The Middle East and North Africa is the region most affected by water scarcity in the world, and for the moment, the situation seems set to worsen.

Water scarcity features among FAO’s five new strategic objectives. Credit: Bigstock

“In Yemen, we do not have many sources of fresh water and rain water is certainly not enough for our needs,” Gunid Ali Abdullah, planning director at Yemen’s Ministry of Agriculture, tells TerraViva in Rome. “We are all the time having to dig deeper and deeper to get water from aquifers.” Read more

Drought and chronic water shortages played a significant role in sparking Syria’s civil war and in unrest throughout much of the Middle East, water experts now believe.

Drought has left some parts of Sri Lanka’s dry zone scorched and crops devastated. Credit: Photostock

Around the world, water demand already exceeds supply in regions with more than 40 percent of the world’s population. That may climb to 60 percent in the coming decade, a new study has found. Read more