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The past 12 months have been the warmest in Australia’s recorded history, where average temperature has warmed by 1.6-degrees F since 1910
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“There’s a lot of hype around this issue,†says Upmanu Lall, professor of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University and director of its Water Center. But, he says, we’re in little danger of running out of water overall. One could conceive of a scenario in which we’ve used up all the freshwater locked in ice or aquifers. Indeed, the water table has already dropped at an alarming rate in specific regions. (We’re on pace to deplete the Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies much of the Great Plains, in the coming decades, for example.) But even if that happened, we’d still have access to other forms of water. “The most common resource is rainfall, and that’s renewable,†Lall explains. “It’s nature’s way of treating water through a distilling mechanism.â€
‘The most common resource is rainfall, and that’s renewable.’
In places where water has grown scarce, farmers may be forced to change their approach to watering crops. Some may switch from using groundwater to collecting rain, or another more efficient option. In the Great Plains, exploitation of the Ogallala has made further pumping much more expensive than it was. It may soon make more sense to invest in better means of irrigation. Some are even talking about piping in water from the Great Lakes. With water, it’s easy to fret over a grim future. What’s harder is innovating our way toward a brighter one.Â
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
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Filed under: China, Marketing/Advertising, Safety, Technology, Videos, Volkswagen
Distracted driving continues to be a scourge to road safety around the world. In the US, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ran a graphic commercial in April appealing to young people about the dangers of texting and driving. In Hong Kong, Volkswagen helped with a technologically savvy way to make people understand the peril.
For the innovative ad to work, a movie theater was equipped with a location-based broadcaster that could send a mass text to everyone in the room at once. At the same time, a special short film aired before the feature.
In case you don’t see where this is going, we aren’t going to spoil the outcome. But this seems like an extremely effective way to get people’s attention about the dangers of texting and driving. The only major problem with it is that the broadcaster limits the audience to the people in one specific place. Scroll down to watch this ingenious public service announcement and the effect it has on moviegoers.
Continue reading VW ‘Eyes on the road’ ad brings danger of texting and driving to the movies
VW ‘Eyes on the road’ ad brings danger of texting and driving to the movies originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 09 Jun 2014 14:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Most of us don’t tend to think a lot about recalled products unless we hear about it on the news, which means it’s fairly major. In an attempt to make it easier to disseminate information about recalls, the FDA has started its own Flickr account.
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When you’re a perfectionist, it’s hard not to look at your last project and constantly find things you hate about it. Legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki suggests that having your next project ready is sometimes the only way to get over it.
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A couple of crafty 14-year-old kids from Winnipeg figured out how to get past the security on a a Bank of Montreal ATM. Crazy as it might sound, the "hack" didn’t require any advanced computer hacking at all—these kids just looked up the ATM manual on the internet.
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Training wheels are great for getting kids rolling, but they don’t really develop the balance required for real riding. Jyrobike takes a different approach to the learning process, providing a more authentic cycling experience while still offering…
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