Our oceans, it is thought, came from space, as ice-rich comets rocked the early Earth. But some of that water, which set the conditions for life to arise, may have been born from the Sun.

On top of providing us with heat and light, and forming the gravitational basis of our solar system, the Sun is constantly pumping out a flow of ions known as the solar wind. Made up of charged particles, mostly the bare nuclei of hydrogen atoms, the solar wind streams out across the solar system, driving the aurorae, affecting the chemistry of our atmosphere and, according to a new study, sprinkling space with water. Read more

World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has estimated how much the world ocean is. The figure was not so astronomical: 24.2 trillion dollars. And about two and a half trillion is the total budget of transportation on the seas. If you sum up these two numbers, then the oceans will be only the seventh economy of the world after the United States, China, Japan, Germany, France and Britain.

However, many experts believe that it is unreasonably low, and it’s simply impossible to evaluate in monetary terms all we get from the reservoirs of the planet. Read more

The University of Technology, Lappeenranta (Finland) suggests using lower temperatures for wastewater treatment in the mining industry.

The surface layer of ice is cleaner in crystallization. It can be melted and reused in the production process after filtration.

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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