Ginger is one of the most powerful spices on the market today. Its health benefits and medicinal uses are endless, and we would do well to pay attention to the positive attributes that ginger can provide us. While we probably know ginger in the root form as something we add to certain food dishes, or maybe throw into a juice if we are feeling festive or a little run down, ginger actually comes in many forms, and we are really only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

Ginger is packed with nutrients and bioactive compounds that help relieve anything from digestive problems to motion sickness. The root can be consumed fresh, or it can be ground into powder; it can be juiced, dried, or turned into oil. It also can be consumed as a beverage: ginger water, which is made by boiling the ginger root down and then straining the remaining liquid. Here are five reasons and benefits of ginger water as part of your daily diet. Read more

The vast majority of people do not have access to safe drinking water. The global intake of water is doubling every twenty years. The consumption of water is increasing twice the rate of the population. According to an estimate, by 2025 at least 3 billion people will have no access to clean water.

The scarcity of water is becoming a harsh reality because of the increasing demands of water supply, rapidly increasing population, water-intensive agriculture and the faster consumption of water by economic development. Climate change is also contributing to the water crisis.

There are several disadvantages of consuming unsafe drinking water. Here are some of the reasons unclean drinking water can affect the health of people. Read more

The bottled water industry is about as wasteful as they come. This billion dollar industry is taking something that is essentially free around the world, packaging it, and selling it for profit. And it gets worse.

And 10 facts about the bottled water industry.

Nestlé — the same company that brings you those delicious Toll House cookies — decided in May to open a new plant in the middle of the drought-stricken desert in Arizona.

This decision has raised many concerns and questions, the most obvious being “how can they bottle water in a desert?”

Many of the concerned groups are environmental activists. Nestle already faces backlash from groups angry about them bottling water in the San Bernardino Mountains, and a group in Oregon voted in favor of anti-bottling measures on a proposed anti-bottling measures. Read more

Long thought to be bone dry, the moon has recently been confirmed as relatively water rich. But a big question remains: Where did the wet—or more accurately, icy—stuff come from?

A new study might have the answer: The moon’s water may have, in a sense, sailed in on the solar wind. The discovery hints at a previously unknown method of delivering water to the inner solar system—and a new way to produce water and rocket fuel for future space missions.

Solar particles may combine with oxygen in the lunar surface (file picture), creating water.

Until now the only known method of delivering water to inner solar system bodies such as Earth and the moon was through collisions with water-rich asteroids or comets from farther out in space—beyond the system’s “snow line,” where it’s cold enough for water to condense into ice.

But a team led by planetary scientist Yang Liu says it’s found another way, thanks to evidence of water and a water precursor molecule—hydroxyl—locked inside lunar soil samples brought to Earth by NASA astronauts. Water consists of two hydrogen atoms bound to one oxygen atom, while hydroxyl is one part hydrogen, one part oxygen. Read more

If I were called in / To construct a religion / I should make use of water, wrote the English poet Philip Larkin in 1954—and most religions do.

Waters, religious historian Mircea Eliade explained in the 1950s, are “spring and origin, the reservoir of all the possibilities of existence; they precede every form and support every creation.” So it has been since human history began and, by legend, before. The world, Genesis says, was brought to life by a God who created a “firmament in the midst of the waters.”

Babylonians believed in a world made from a commingling of fresh and salt water. Pima Indians have said Mother Earth was impregnated by a drop of water. The cataclysmic flood that destroys a civilization is also an aqueous archetype and part of Hebrew, Greek, and Aztec cultures. Read more