News tagged with liquid water
Water still has a few secrets to tell
(PhysOrg.com) -- We are used to thinking of water as a substance with relatively few secrets left. Its basic structure has been studied by high school students for decades, and water is considered essential ...
Jan 21, 2010 |
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Why Does Water Expand When it Cools? A New Explanation
(PhysOrg.com) -- Most of us, when we take our first science classes, learn that when things cool down, they shrink. (When they heat up, we learn, they usually expand.) However, water seems to be the exception ...
Jul 17, 2009 |
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Super-Earth unlikely able to transfer life to other planets
While scientists believe conditions suitable for life might exist on the so-called "super-Earth" in the Gliese 581 system, it's unlikely to be transferred to other planets within that solar system.
Mar 20, 2012 |
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Electrons in concert: A simple probe for collective motion in ultracold plasmas
(PhysOrg.com) -- Collective, or coordinated behavior is routine in liquids, where waves can occur as atoms act together. In a milliliter (mL) of liquid water, 1022 molecules bob around, colliding. When a bre ...
Feb 06, 2012 |
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New super-earth detected within the habitable zone of a nearby star
(PhysOrg.com) -- An international team of scientists has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. With an orbital period of about 28 days and a minimum mass 4.5 times that of ...
Feb 02, 2012 |
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Kepler finds first earth-size planets beyond our solar system
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star ...
Dec 20, 2011 |
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Kepler confirms its first planet in habitable zone of sun-like star
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the "habitable zone," the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Kepler also has discovered more than 1,000 ...
Dec 05, 2011 |
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Supercooled: Water doesn't have to freeze until -55 F
(PhysOrg.com) -- We drink water, bathe in it and we are made mostly of water, yet the common substance poses major mysteries. Now, University of Utah chemists may have solved one enigma by showing how cold ...
Nov 23, 2011 |
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Scientists find evidence for 'great lake' on Jupiter's moon Europa, potential new habitat for life
In a significant finding in the search for life beyond Earth, scientists from The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere have discovered what appears to be a body of liquid water the volume of the North ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Nov 16, 2011 |
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Study of clays suggests watery Mars underground
(PhysOrg.com) -- A new NASA study suggests if life ever existed on Mars, the longest lasting habitats were most likely below the Red Planet's surface.
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Nov 02, 2011 |
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Wet and mild: Researchers take the temperature of Mars's past
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have directly determined the surface temperature of early Mars for the first time, providing evidence that's consistent with ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Oct 12, 2011 |
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Research shows how life might have survived 'snowball Earth'
Global glaciation likely put a chill on life on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, but new research indicates that simple life in the form of photosynthetic algae could have survived in a narrow body ...
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Oct 11, 2011 |
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First comet found with ocean-like water: New clues to creation of Earth's oceans
(PhysOrg.com) -- New evidence supports the theory that comets delivered a significant portion of Earth's oceans, which scientists believe formed about 8 million years after the planet itself.
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Oct 05, 2011 |
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Microbial life on Mars: Could saltwater make it possible?
(PhysOrg.com) -- How common are droplets of saltwater on Mars? Could microbial life survive and reproduce in them? A new million-dollar NASA project led by the University of Michigan aims to answer those questions.
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Aug 17, 2011 |
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How wet is water's surface? Some water molecules split the difference between gas and liquid
(PhysOrg.com) -- Air and water meet over most of the earth's surface, but exactly where one ends and the other begins turns out to be a surprisingly subtle question.
Jun 08, 2011 |
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Water
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.
For more information about Water, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
