“Maybe ignorance is bliss, but we can’t be ignorant any more. The consequences are too dire for human health and the health of the planet.” Photographer Ed Burtynsky is contemplating climate change, an unheralded but ever-present character in his latest book and film, Watermark, a clip of which he showed at TED2014 in Vancouver. And the mild-mannered artist is fired up.

Pivot Irrigation #11, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA, 2011.

“There is a fundamental flaw in democracy, where career politicians vie for power in the next election and long-term thinking has somehow disappeared,” he told me last week. “The only chance we have is that we elect more people who are capable of making difficult changes. If we allow the people with special interests, whether that’s big pharma, big oil or big agra, to shape all the policies to their own benefit and not for the long-term survival of our species, then we’ve created our own bed. We’re allowing this to happen; we need to stop it.” Read more

Lenses which focus as a real eye is a photographers’ dream. And how about simple lenses on which any image is projected – even a favourite TV show? And military dreams are augmented reality lenses and “invisibility ray”. It turns out that prototypes of all these devices already exist.

Camera will become an eye. Yet human eye is considered to be an ideal lense. It can focus on different objects, no matter how far they are. Until recent time contemporary photographic and video equipment was far from it. Scientists from Ohio State University invented a water filled lense which can rapidly change focus by changing its form. Device works similarly as an insects’s eye. The entire lense is composed of a great number of tiny domed niches, connected by channels, so the liquid can flow from one dome to another. Lense developers believe that this will be a breakthrough in digital cameras capabilities and they will become more safe, because they will require less object-glasses. Read more

1. 3.4 million people—mainly children— die as a result of preventable water-related diseases every year.

2. 1.2 billion people—nearly 20 percent of the world’s population—live in areas of physical water scarcity. What does that mean? Water withdrawals for agriculture, industry, and domestic purposes exceed 75 percent of river flows.

3. In developing countries, an estimated 90 percent of sewage and 70 percent of industrial waste is discharged into waterways without any treatment at all. Read more

Small, autonomous airboats, disguised to look like crocodiles, helped scientists measure water quality this spring in Kenya’s Mara River. An estimated 4,000 hippos use the river as a toilet with potentially deadly effects for fish living downriver.

Autonomous airboats, disguised to look like crocodiles skimmed the surface of hippopotamus pools in Kenya’s Mara River where they scanned the river bottom for deposits of hippo dung and made various water quality measurements.

The airboats, developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute and operated by a CMU spinoff, Platypus LLC, skimmed over the surface of several hippopotamus pools in the river, where they scanned the river bottom for deposits of hippo dung and made various measurements of water quality.

No human would dare venture onto this brown water in which so many hippos slosh around. But the animals, considered among the most dangerous in Africa, generally tolerated the two-foot-long boats much as they do the river’s crocodiles. Read more