Camping can be fun, but going without the comforts of home isn’t for everybody. So if your idea of roughin’ it for the weekend still includes ice cold water and the ability to charge your phone, the Little Luxury Outdoor Extreme Water Cooler might be for you.

The Little Luxury Cooler is designed to be filled right from a natural water source, thanks to a filter designed to remove the nasties you might encounter drinking straight from a river or lake, and chills the water to a refreshing 43° F (6° C).

According to its inventor, Laurelle Charne, the idea for the water cooler came about during a camping trip that involved lugging big, heavy bottles of water to the site, even though there was a beautiful stream right there. Read more

Researchers from the University of Alexandria have developed a cheaper, simpler and potentially cleaner way to turn seawater into drinking water than conventional methods.

Researchers in Cairo have invented a cheap, simple way to turn seawater into drinking water

This could have a huge impact on rural areas of the Middle East and North Africa, where access to clean water is a pressing issue if social stability and economic development is to improve.

Right now, desalinating seawater is the only viable way to provide water to growing populations, and large desalination plants are now a fact of life in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries.

Most of these plants rely on a multi-step process based on reverse osmosis, which requires expensive infrastructure and large amounts of electricity. These plants release large quantities of highly concentrated salt water and other pollutants back into the seas and oceans as part of the desalination process, creating problems for marine environments. Read more

Liquid water covers some 70 percent of Earth’s surface, making the planet unique in the solar system. But where that water came from has been a bit of a puzzle.

The volcanic plume responsible for the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano in Iceland has also brought up bits of Earth’s ancient mantle from deep inside the planet.

Early in its history, Earth’s surface was so hot that any water would have evaporated into space. Anything that is here today, scientists have thought, must have come from asteroids or comets that later struck the cooling world.

But maybe not. A new analysis in Science suggests that at least some of Earth’s current moisture derives from water-soaked dust particles trapped deep inside during the planet’s formation. Read more

13 But much of that freshwater is locked up as ice in glaciers, ice caps and permafrost. People get most of their water from rivers, which make up only 0.49 percent of surface freshwater. What if we could diversify and pull water from the air, instead?

The water bottle comes from Austrian industrial designer Kristof Retezár, who wanted to make a simple, portable tool to help people where drinkable water isn’t easy to get. Engineers have long hoped to help water-scarce regions by achieving this goal. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs reports that 1.2 billion people, around a fifth of the world’s population, live in areas where water is physically scarce. Another 1.6 live in countries where water infrastructure and storage is lacking.  Read more

When the local water management agency closes your favorite beach due to unhealthy water quality, how reliable are the tests they base their decisions on? As it turns out, those tests, as well as the standards behind them, have not been updated in decades. Now scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a highly accurate, DNA-based method to detect and distinguish sources of microbial contamination in water.

To develop a microbial reference library, the berkeley lab researchers collected poop from a wide variety of animals, as well as septic tanks and sewer plants.

Using the award-winning PhyloChip, a credit card-sized device that can detect the presence of more than 60,000 species of bacteria and archaea, the new method was found to be more sensitive than conventional methods at assessing health risks. In tests at the Russian River watershed in Northern California, the Berkeley Lab researchers found instances where their method identified potential human health risks that conventional fecal indicator tests had failed to detect. Conversely, they also found instances where the conventional tests flagged bacteria that weren’t likely risks to human health. Read more