Entries tagged with 'water'
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You know you don't actually have to drink eight glasses of water a day, right? (Not from physical cups, at least.) Slate looks into the history of the "drink eight glasses of water a day" myth....
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Stephen Colbert interviews inventor Dean Kamen (best known for the Segway) to talk about his vapor compression distiller, a machine that takes contaminated water and turn it into pure drinking water without the use of filters or chemicals. Colbert tests the distiller by adding Doritos to the "contaminated water" container. The technology behind vapor compression distillers isn't necessarily new, but Kamen's invention looks a lot more compact than already existing vapor compression distillers. Since Kamen appears to have just announced his distiller on the Colbert Report last week, there isn't much information available about it yet. Watch the interview, after the jump....
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Of course not! But "under the right circumstances," hot water can freeze faster than cold. "Part of the reason appears to be that hotter water loses mass to evaporation, and because it has less mass, less energy is needed to freeze it." And that is what's known as the Mpemba Effect....
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New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni wrote a blog post that nicely complements the Old Gray Lady's editorial yesterday on choosing tap over bottled water when dining out. Bruni, who knows a thing or two about eating out, has noticed a slight softening in the bottled-water hard sell but still finds that too often diners are asked "sparkling or flat?"—as if there's no option to order tap. But I think restaurants shouldn’t try to pressure diners into ordering bottled water by pretending another option doesn’t exist and by trying to make diners feel abashed about having to bring up that less expensive — indeed, free! — option themselves. I definitely think that’s part of restaurants’ strategy, though I trust,...
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Alice Waters and her Chez Panisse family aren't the only ones ditching fancy bubbly and spring waters to join the pro-faucet movement. As we reported earlier this year, progressive Bay Area restaurants are risking serious cash flow to help cut the overproduction of plastic bottles and the destructive effects it has on municipal garbage operations. Despite many assumptions that tap water is grimy and laced with fatal chemicals, more and more city officials have reported that municipal water supplies are just as good (and safe) as the fancy bottled stuff, if not better. Sorry, Evian. Yesterday's Chicago Tribune had a great, well-researched report by national correspondent Stevenson Swanson about the issue, highlighting the work of West Coast mayors Gavin Newsom...
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Small sensors "the size of a fly's wing" could help farmers save on irrigation costs and reduce impact on the water supply: Clipped permanently to a leaf during the growing season, the sensor would monitor moisture content and chemical signatures that can indicate when the plant is undergoing water stress. The chemical signs, such as an increase in salt and sugar content in the cells, occur much earlier than physical signs, such as drooping leaves, that many farmers rely on now....
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How do you see this glass? If you're Martin Lagod, managing director and co-founder of Firelake Capital Management, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, it's half empty and the tap you wanna top it off with is running dry: According to data collected from NASA and the World Health Organization, 4 billion people will face water shortages by 2050. Already in China, water levels in the Yellow River -- a source that supplies more than 150 million people -- are down 33 percent from the average. In China's cities, wastewater pollution and inadequate treatment facilities have contaminated the water consumed by more than half the population. Of its 669 major cities, 440 face moderate to severe water shortages. The Chinese...
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I've always been somewhat dehydrated, which probably has something to do with my not liking the taste of water and therefore not drinking very much of it. Anyway, it turns out my mom (and probably yours) has been wrong all this time—not only do we not need to drink those eight glasses of water a day, but many people can meet the bare-minimum needs without having anything to drink during the day. Also news to me: people who drink caffeine regularly, like coffee and sodas, become accustomed to it and don't lose fluid; a glass of Coke can provide the same amount of hydrating fluid as the equivalent amount of water! I'm still going to try to drink more...
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The SF Chronicle's Carol Ness reports on one of the area's newest trends: "At a small but growing number of sustainably inclined Bay Area restaurants, bottled water has become as much of an outcast as farmed salmon and out-of-season tomatoes. Instead of bottled water, diners now are served free carafes of -- gasp! -- tap water. It's filtered and comes still or sparkling, fizzed up by a soda-fountain-style carbonating machine." Incanto's been serving tap for years but Chez Panisse used to go through 24,000 bottles of Italian water, an ironic choice for a pioneer of sustainability to make. They investigated using locally made sparkling waters but found them too carbonated to go with their food; eventually they purchased a $400...
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Are those washes for fruit and vegetables worth your money? Alina Tugend of the New York Times thinks not, after talking with University of Maine food science professor Alfred A. Bushway, who found in a study that the washes were no more effective at cleaning fruit than using distilled water—he says you can go ahead and use tap water. If that still makes you a little antsy but you don't want to spring for the washes, you can just use "a mixture of lemon juice and water." [via Apartment Therapy: The Kitchen]...
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