Dams strain as water, death toll keep rising in south Brazil
The death toll from floods and mudslides triggered by torrential storms in southern Brazil climbed to 39 on Friday, officials said, as they warned of worse to come.
The death toll from floods and mudslides triggered by torrential storms in southern Brazil climbed to 39 on Friday, officials said, as they warned of worse to come.
Environment
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More than 100 temperature records fell across Vietnam in April, according to official data, as a deadly heat wave scorches South and Southeast Asia.
Environment
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Biochemistry
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Recent findings that plants employ a drought-survival mechanism to also defend against nutrient-sucking pests could inform future crop breeding programs aimed at achieving better broadscale pest control.
Plants & Animals
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125
A few weeks ago, a team of engineers carefully extracted ESA's EarthCARE satellite from its protective transport container, initiating a meticulous process of inspection, testing and preparation for its liftoff later this ...
Space Exploration
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Plants & Animals
May 3, 2024
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The global demand for palm oil—the most widely consumed vegetable oil on the planet, in everything from instant noodles to lipstick—is driving worldwide tropical deforestation. While many studies have shown the loss of ...
Environment
May 2, 2024
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61
A bemused fishmonger at a seafood market in Portsmouth, N.H., weighed and packaged a dozen filets of fish and three lobster tails for his unusually exacting customers, Dartmouth researchers Celia Chen, Guarini, a research ...
Environment
May 2, 2024
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Artificial intelligence analysis of data gathered by acoustic recording devices is a promising new tool for monitoring the marbled murrelet and other secretive, hard-to-study species, research by Oregon State University and ...
Plants & Animals
May 2, 2024
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2
Fourth-grader Ella Araza sat on a tiny plastic box in her Manila slum home, trying to finish her homework before the afternoon sun sent temperatures soaring to unbearable levels.
Environment
May 2, 2024
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Water is a ubiquitous chemical substance, composed of hydrogen and oxygen, that is essential for the survival of many known forms of life. In typical usage, water refers only to its liquid form or state, but the substance also has a solid state, ice, and a gaseous state, water vapor or steam. Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface. On Earth, it is found mostly in oceans and other large water bodies, with 1.6% of water below ground in aquifers and 0.001% in the air as vapor, clouds (formed of solid and liquid water particles suspended in air), and precipitation. Saltwater oceans hold 97% of surface water, glaciers and polar ice caps 2.4%, and other land surface water such as rivers, lakes and ponds 0.6%. A very small amount of the Earth's water is contained within biological bodies and manufactured products. Other water is trapped in ice caps, glaciers, aquifers, or in lakes, sometimes providing fresh water for life on land.
Water moves continually through a cycle of evaporation or transpiration (evapotranspiration), precipitation, and runoff, usually reaching the sea. Winds carry water vapor over land at the same rate as runoff into the sea. Over land, evaporation and transpiration contribute to the precipitation over land.
Clean, fresh drinking water is essential to human and other lifeforms. Access to safe drinking water has improved steadily and substantially over the last decades in almost every part of the world. There is a clear correlation between access to safe water and GDP per capita. However, some observers have estimated that by 2025 more than half of the world population will be facing water-based vulnerability. Water plays an important role in the world economy, as it functions as a solvent for a wide variety of chemical substances and facilitates industrial cooling and transportation. Approximately 70 percent of freshwater is consumed by agriculture.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA