Basilisk lizards have garnered the nickname Jesus Lizards over the years for their ability to “run” across the surface of water. However, these fast little guys don’t rely on miracles, say scientists. New footage of the lizard, filmed at 2,000 frames per second, will air on the BBC on Monday October 19, revealing the science behind the lizards’ water run. From the Huffington Post:
Simon Blakeney, a producer who had filmed the lizard for the BBC told Matt Walker from BBC Earth News, “Because [the lizards] run so fast they create a bubble as their feet hit the water and then they push off from this bubble before it bursts,” says Blakeney. By balancing and pushing off from these bubbles, the lizard is able to “walk” on water.
The 2-4cm lizards only know one speed—full throttle—and this forces their bodies upright as they sprint across the water. In an older video, courtesy of National Geographic, there is considerable splashing as one lizard’s feet appear to sink below the surface during a run. However scientists say this is due to water being yanked up as the lizards pick their feet up off the surface of the water.
We’ll have to wait for the new footage, which is slowed down to 1/80th the speed of real life, to see for ourselves. But for now, check out the NatGeo video, showing a basilisk lizard scooting across the water in around 49 seconds.
If astronauts can drink water recycled from their urine and Orange county residents can sip on recycled sewage water, then surely people can drink water from their shower, too.
Four French design school students came up with a clever concept: They proposed using a plant system made of sand, reeds, rushes, a mesh filter, water hyacinths and lemnas, and a carbon filter that can be placed underneath the tub to recycle the water used during a shower. After the water goes through eight filtering steps, the contaminants in the water, like shampoo and soap (and your newly-removed dirt), can be turned into tasty, drinkable water.
[Designer Jun] Yasumoto, 34, said: “These plants have been proven to be able to remove the chemicals from your shampoo.”
Using a natural filtering principle called phyto-purification, the bathroom becomes a mini-eco-system by recycling and regenerating the wastewater.
The designers put their drawings online—and, not surprisingly, people soon wrote to them and asked how they could purchase the system. But sadly, the concept has not actually been built yet. On the bright side, there are other ways of conserving water in the bathroom—like peeing in the shower.
Navy chemists are claiming they can take seawater and turn it into hydrocarbon fuel—which, if it ever happens, would be great, since the ocean contains 140 times the amount of carbon dioxide held in the air. But right now, the notion of an endless supply of jet fuel from the Atlantic seems too good to be true.
Granted, the idea is gaining ground: Researchers are working on the process of taking carbon dioxide from ocean water and mixing it with hydrogen that has been split from water molecules. And Naval Research Laboratory chemist Robert Dorner has even been able to create fuel from refined seawater by tweaking a process that normally uses coal to produce hydrocarbon fuel.
But before seawater can become a gasoline resource, the researchers will have to figure out the right catalyst to use. In general, too much methane is produced when the wrong catalysts are used in fuel-making, causing fewer hydrocarbons to form—which means less fuel is produced.
So assuming it all gets ironed out, what are the chances this would ever work? Well, scientists have been able to take just about anything and turn it into oil, including turkey, poop, and human corpses—but these alternative sources still haven’t become anything close to major sources of fuel.
About 3 p.m. Sunday, Bellevue firefighters were called to the 17100 block of Northeast Fifth Street after neighbors saw flames and smoke.
“It appears that a glass bowl, partially filled with water and elevated on a wire rack in a sunny area of the home’s deck, provided the right conditions to focus the sunlight and start a fire,” Lt. Eric Keenan said.
They should have listened to the warnings from the ants.
It’s only Monday, and there’s already a toss-up for worst science article of the week. Scientists at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health seem not to have realized that when it comes to weight gain, we’ve got one thing figured out: The fewer calories you consume, the less weight you put on. So they spent time and resources on a study to reach the following conclusion: Drinking water is less likely to cause obesity in kids than drinking sugar-sweetened drinks like soda and juice.
Weirder yet, the researchers don’t even sound assertive, as if their hypothesis needs further testing—not drinking sugary beverages, they say, “can reduce” excess calorie consumption. Well, yes, it can—and it does.
But while there’s validity, however obvious, to the Columbia study, the U.K.’s Bath Spa University has just published its own, er, breed of ludicrous research: a study concluding that pet owners look like their dogs.
The same technology that makes ravers at a club look like they’re gyrating in slow motion can be used to levitate water. Watch it here!
It’s a nifty illusion created by strobe lights, or a stroboscope, a device that emits quick pulses of light. In the setup shown in the video, all the water drops are actually falling and most of the time they are invisible. The drops are only visible during the millisecond pulses of the strobe light. By adjusting these pulses to the rate of the falling drops, the drops can be made to look like they are traveling at certain speeds, hovering in midair, or even levitating. Your mind automatically connects the images illuminated by the pulses, likes frames of an animated cartoon, creating the illusion of gravity-defying motion. What you perceive as a rising drop of water is actually frames of many different falling drops. The same concept is behind the wagon-wheel effect often seen in movies.
At a time when only one in six people on the planet have access to water and bottled water is not always the most practical (or environmentally sound) option, inventors are busy trying to turn just about anything into water. If you thought astronauts drinking water from urine was a bit gross, then drinking water made from air might sound like a far more appealing option. And now, the Canadian company Element Four’s Water Mill has determined a way to take moisture from the air and turn it into drinkable water.
The machine is the size of a large golf ball cut in half , and it runs off the “electricity of about three light bulbs.” It works by pumping air through filters to get rid of dust and other particles, and then cools the purified air until water starts to condense. Then the condensed water goes through a UV light unit to clean it so bacteria won’t get in it and cause infections or disease.
The Endeavor shuttle shot into space last week carrying loads of fancy equipment for the International Space Station. Among the new gadgets to be installed is a water recovery system that promises to recycle 93 percent of astronaut urine, sweat, exhaled water vapor, and other waste water back into drinkable water. The whole shebang cost about $250 million to develop, but that’s still cheaper than having to send periodic shuttles to the station to deliver fresh water.
Of course, the question on everyone’s mind is, what does it taste like?
New York Times reporter John Schwartz took it upon himself to find out. He went to the Kennedy Space center where NASA officials offered him a bottle of water made from a 2005 prototype of the system. (The scientists generously “donated” their own liquids for the test run.) The label on the bottle read, “We use only the finest ingredients! Urine, Perspiration, Food Vapors, Bath Water, Simulated Animal Waste, and a touch of Iodine. No Carbs or Calories Added.”
When NASA’s Phoenix Lander touches down on Mars this weekend—presuming it survives the hot and harrowing descent to the surface—scientists hope that it finds more evidence of water. A new study in Science uses an Idaho gorge to suggest that the surface of Mars may have once been covered in huge quantities of water, though that may not be as good a portent for finding life on the Red Planet as it might sound.
While the Colorado River gradually carved the Grand Canyon over the last five or six millions years, there’s more than one way to scoop out a chasm. Short but massive deluges of water can do it, too. That’s how Michael Lamb and his team at the University of California, Berkeley think that Box Canyon in eastern Idaho was created.
According to a story by Ed Price, the Yankees beat reporter for the New Jersey Star Ledger, bottled water has been banned from the dugouts of Major League Baseball. Gatorade—not water—is the “official sports drink” of MLB, and cannot bear to share the dugout with any other form of hydration. Price’s article, which has been heavily blogged, says that players can’t be seen drinking anything but Gatorade—not even Aquafina, the “official water” of MLB. According to White Sox clubhouse personnel, if players take bottled water to the bench, all the bottled water will be removed from the clubhouse as punishment.
This seems like an pretty bad move on Gatorade’s part, as encroaching on an athlete’s right to freedom of hydration might create a bit of a backlash. And it turns out Gatorade actually isn’t that recklessly narcissistic—Price’s article is bogus.
If astronauts can drink water recycled from 
Cross-posted from 
It’s only Monday, and there’s already a toss-up for worst science article of the week. Scientists at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health seem not to have realized that when it comes to weight gain, we’ve got one thing figured out: The fewer calories you consume, the less weight you put on. So they spent time and resources on a study to reach the following conclusion: 
The same technology that makes ravers at a club look like they’re gyrating in slow motion can be used to levitate water. 
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The Endeavor shuttle 
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