Owens was once a vast lake, but in 1913, an aquaduct was constructed to feed its waters into the growing City of Los Angeles. As the lake dried up, towns like Keeler, which attracted revenue from both its mines and its lakeside location, transformed into hot, marshy patches of land. And Keeler didn't just lose tourist revenue from the disappearance of the lake. Once Owens vanished, Keeler was plagued by pervasive dust storms, including old mining chemicals kicked up from the now dry lake bed.

A lawsuit forced the Los Angeles Water Department to build pools in an attempt to restore Keeler's ecosystem, and continued mining encouraged some residents to stay through the 1960s and 1970s, but continued dust storms and lung cancer deaths eventually pushed even the hardiest souls out of town. Today, Keeler ranks as the second dustiest place on Earth, after Kazakhstan's Aral Sea, and only a ghost town remains.

Strange Geographies: the Little Town That Los Angeles Killed [Mental Floss]

This is the farthest, and thus the oldest, water ever seen in the Universe. (Because the light from this quasar took 11.1 billion years to reach Earth, it is 11.1 billion years old.)

Max Planck Institute researcher Violette Impellizzeri discovered the water vapor using spectroscopic analysis - essentially, looking for a radio signal that matches the signature of a water molecule (see image). She found the water in just 14 hours by using a nearby galaxy as a telescopic lens: The galaxy's gravity magnifies the light coming from objects behind it, quadrupling the images of those objects (you can see all four versions of the quasar in the picture) and making their radio signatures easier to analyze. Essentially, she created a gravity lens.

Said Impellizzeri:

Others have tried and failed to find water, and we knew we were looking for a very faint signal, so we thought of using a foreground galaxy like a cosmic magnifying glass to observe at a far greater distance and had to be persistent, and sure enough the line emission of water popped up.

Added co-researcher John McKean:

It is interesting that we found water in the first gravitationally-magnified object we observed from the distant Universe. This suggests that the water molecule may have been much more abundant in the early Universe than first thought, and can be used for further research into supermassive black holes and galaxy evolution at high redshift.

So water may be more common, and more ancient, than we ever imagined. Although this water vapor was part of a cloud of dust around a supermassive black hole at the heart of a quasar, it could also mean that water exists in far more mundane parts of the Universe too. On water planets like Earth, for example.

SOURCE: Max Planck Institute

If you'd like to enjoy a cool pint of fresh water in space, the "shipped-from-Earth" variety will cost you $15,000. That's why the International Space Station captures every bit of evaporated water possible, collects it and purifies it for use as drinking water. While astronauts were apparently fine with drinking each other's sweat, exhaled water vapor and shower water, NASA hadn't crossed the urine barrier yet. But that's about to change.

Last week, Space Shuttle Endeavor carried aloft a Michigan Technological University designed Water Recovery System. Here's how it turns pee into a refreshing drink:

1). Urine is distilled, removing a bunch of the "bad stuff" you wouldn't want to drink.
2). It's combined with the other waste water (the sweat and shower water).
3). Solids are filtered out. You don't want someone's hair in your morning drink.
4). The water passes through a bunch of multi-filtration beds made of materials that remove contaminants either by absorbing them or negating them via ion exchange.
5). At this point, the water holds some non-organics and solvents. A reactor breaks those impurities down into carbon dioxide, water and ions.
6). Leaving behind the CO2 and the ions gives you water that's as pure as a mountain stream. Probably purer. Image by: NASA.

Turning Urine Into Water For Space Station Recycling. [Science Daily]

Nam’s pump uses a wooden boardwalk, which he sees placed on major roads and other sources of heavy foot traffic. The kinetic energy from humans and animals stepping on the boardwalk can then be stored and used to power underground pumps, which bring water to the surface. The waterfall presents a dramatic effect, but the main purpose of the sculpture is to allow citizens to easily and efficiently collect water for drinking and farming, ensuring that they have a readily available source of safe water, and freeing up the time usually spent pumping water by hand.

The Human Pump will get a test drive as part of Urban Re:Vision, where it will debut as part of an effort to build a sustainable city block in the city of Dallas.

Human Pump [Re:Vision via Inhabitat]

Tosca's calculations paint a picture of ancient Mars that'd be a nasty place for young life to try and grow up in, but not all researchers are throwing in the towel yet. From yesterday's ScienceNOW article:

"Tosca et al. are making some very good points," writes planetary geochemist Jeffrey Kargel of the University of Arizona, Tucson, in an e-mail, but "they carry it too far." Perhaps early exploration has been drawn to the most saline and therefore most obvious sites, he writes, missing more hospitable places. Microbiologist Kenneth Nealson of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles also holds out hope for life. Faced with greater challenges, martian life may have evolved even better ways to cope with salty water than Earth's microbes have devised. "Keep on following the water" is the message, say these optimists—and the Phoenix lander is doing just that. Within weeks, it will be analyzing far younger and presumably far fresher water in the martian arctic.

Source: Science

The Earthrise photo (and check out the video if you really want to feel tiny) taken from Apollo 8 is one of the most famous space pics ever taken. Along with a few other nearly identical images, the shots are the only space-borne perspective that feature our pale blue dot from anything like a wide-angle view. This sort of thing is exactly what we need more of, Wolfe said. Imaging all of the phases of Earth (crescent, half, gibbous, full, etc.) from at least one lunar distance away would give us tons of info for what a world with continents, a dynamic atmosphere and water looks like.

The grand prize would be taking an image of the Sun's reflection on our oceans in polarized light. "That would give us a measurement of what the glint of sunlight on water looks like," Wolfe said, which could be used to determine whether planets are other stars have liquid water on their surfaces too.

Image: NASA

First and foremost, it is a water tank that collects and stores rain water. It also cools the air in the living room, holds the roof intact, and is linked to an outside tank that keeps extra water needed for flushing toilets and watering the garden. Structurally, it holds the roof intact and separates the giant space into kitchen, living, eating, and work zones. Images by Peter Bennetts

Paul Morgan Architects via Materialicious

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• Victor Gonzalez, Ignacio Vargas and Angel Tena for the creation of the RealFlow software application. "RealFlow was the first widely adopted, commercially available, easy-to-use system for the simulation of realistic liquids in motion picture visual effects."
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• Jonathan Cohen, Dr. Jerry Tessendorf, Dr. Jeroen Molemaker and Michael Kowalski for the development of the system of fluid dynamics tools at Rhythm & Hues. "This system allows artists to create realistic animation of liquids and gases, using novel simulation techniques for accuracy and speed, as well as a unique scripting language for working with volumetric data."
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• Duncan Brinsmead, Jos Stam, Julia Pakalns and Martin Werner for the design and implementation of the Maya Fluid Effects system. "This system is used to create simulations of gaseous phenomena integrated into the widely available Maya tool suite, using an unconditionally stable semi-Lagrangian solver."
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• Stephan Trojansky, Thomas Ganshorn and Oliver Pilarski for the development of the Flowline fluid effects system. "Flowline is a flexible system that incorporates highly parallel computation, allowing rapid iteration and resulting in detailed, realistic fluid effects."
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• Dr. Doug Roble, Nafees Bin Zafar and Ryo Sakaguchi for the development of the fluid simulation system at Digital Domain. "This influential and flexible production-proven system incorporates innovative algorithms and refined adaptations of published methods to achieve large-scale water effects."
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• Nick Rasmussen, Ron Fedkiw and Frank Losasso Petterson for the development of the Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) fluid simulation system. "This production-proven simulation system achieves large-scale water effects within ILM's Zeno framework. It includes integrating particle level sets, parallel computation, and tools that enable the artistic direction of the results."
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