Water filtering out of the floor of a deep Ontario mine has been trapped underground for more than a billion years. It bubbles with gasses carrying nutrients that could sustain microbial life.

Water filtering out of the floor of a deep Ontario mine has been trapped underground for more than a billion years. It bubbles with gasses carrying nutrients that could sustain microbial life.

Scientists working 2.4 kilometres below Earth’s surface in a Canadian mine have tapped a source of water that has remained isolated for at least a billion years. The researchers say they do not yet know whether anything has been living in it all this time, but the water contains high levels of methane and hydrogen — the right stuff to support life.

Micrometre-scale pockets in minerals billions of years old can hold water that was trapped during the minerals’ formation. But no source of free-flowing water passing through interconnected cracks or pores in Earth’s crust has previously been shown to have stayed isolated for more than tens of millions of years. Read more

For anyone currently whiling away their time at a beach (with a laptop and Internet connection, I guess), this question might occur to you. How do gulls, those birds so adept at stealing your sandwich or even invading your hotel room through an open balcony, drink saltwater?

Gulls, and many other charadriiform birds, have supraorbital glands (also called nasal or salt glands) that help regulate the ionic balance of their blood, according to Britannica Online. While some salt is processed by the kidneys, the excess runs through the glands, which are positioned in grooves of the skull, and trickles out through the nostrils. Other animals also have salt glands, including sea turtles, crocodiles (crocodile tears) and sharks.

Interestingly however, saltwater isn’t the gulls’ drink of choice. If they have the opportunity, or if they’re trying to conserve energy, they’ll stick to easier-to-process freshwater. It got me thinking about our own versions of salt glands — no, certainly not our kidneys, they’re lightweights when it comes to salt. I’m thinking of desalination plants, energy-intensive operations that turn saltwater into fresh. Read more

Water gardens are not a modern garden idea. Using water in gardens is part of an ancient tradition originating in India and the Middle East, where fountains and pools provided a soothing antidote to the stifling midday heat.

Gardeners for the great houses of the aristocracy in England and France later adapted these ideas for use in more northerly climes, realizing that the presence of water can be a beautiful and restful addition to a garden in any climate. Read more

Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons, is hiding a secret beneath its icy crust, but humanity is closer than ever to cracking it.

This NASA illustration shows the Galileo spacecraft after it cruised through a plume bursting from Europa (foreground). Jupiter’s in the background. When water vapor is vented into space, the resulting plume becomes ionized. As the plume interacts with the magnetic field, it causes a characteristic “blip” in the magnetic field

Thought to possess a vast subsurface ocean of liquid water, the fourth-largest Jovian moon is a tantalizing place that could have all the right conditions for extraterrestrial life. In fact, NASA is currently designing a devoted mission, called the Europa Clipper, to possibly reveal its habitable potential. But scientists didn’t need a new spacecraft to make this ground-breaking discovery; they studied old data from a spacecraft that was exploring Jupiter in 1997. That’s according to a May 2018 study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. Read more