so, evidence has already been out there is water on earth people, and news flash, it is being used faster then it can be naturally replenished. dont let NASA's TOTAL RECAL fiasco fool you.

that part is very true.

Links to four decent spacey stories this week:

A team of NASA scientists led by a member of the Spitzer Science Center believe they have found a way to predict the color of plants on planets in other solar systems.

or

Using a quartet of space observatories, University of Maryland astronomers may have cracked a 45-year mystery surrounding two ghostly spiral arms in the galaxy M106..

or

Chefs have long used a simple trick to differentiate between a raw and hard-boiled egg. By spinning an egg and watching how it behaves when the spin is disrupted, it's easy to tell whether its interior is solid or liquid. Applying a similar test to the planet Mercury, astronomers have found strong evidence that the planet closest to the sun has a fluid core...


or
For the first time, astronomers have created a rough map of a planet orbiting a distant sun-like star, employing a technique that may one day enable mapping of Earth-like worlds...

Saturn moon could yield new insight into origins of life: http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/070510tholin.html

http://space.newscientist.com/articl...s-stripes.html

Jupiter's cloud patterns are undergoing dramatic changes, reveal new images by the Hubble Space Telescope. Similar transformations of the giant planet's clouds have been witnessed before, but never in such detail – and they have never been explained.

Hubble has been keeping an eye on Jupiter to provide context for close-up observations made by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which flew by the solar system's largest planet in February on its way to Pluto.

Some changes were already evident in January, when Jupiter became observable again after a period when it was too close to the Sun in the sky for Hubble to image. At that time, cloud bands around its equator that had been whitish for the past 15 years or so were noticeably darker.

Then, between 25 March and 5 June, a white band in the planet's northern hemisphere turned brown, while a gap in the cloud layer produced a serpent-shaped dark streak in the same area. White bands in the southern hemisphere seem to be changing colour now, too, says Amy Simon-Miller of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US.

"This is the first time that we've been able to watch the sequence with high-resolution spacecraft images," she told New Scientist.

Fresh ice

Similar transformations happened in the 1980s and early 1990s. Although Hubble was in orbit during the second transformation, its initially flawed vision had not been corrected yet by a space shuttle servicing mission.

This time around, the planet has been observed during its transformation not only by Hubble and New Horizons but also at infrared wavelengths by several ground-based telescopes that were also providing context observations for
New Horizons.

The reasons for the changes are not clear. White clouds are thought to be higher up in the planet's atmosphere than darker clouds and made of fresher ammonia ice. But exactly what gives the lower-altitude brownish clouds their distinctive colour is one of the biggest mysteries about Jupiter.

Scientists still do not understand what drives these major shifts in the distribution of these clouds, but the new observations could be the key. "This is the first time that we really have a complete set of data, so we hope that we can use this and figure out what's going on," Miller says.

Hello again, HP.

A small galaxy ablaze with a burst of star formation appears in a Hubble Space Telescope image released on Tuesday. A merger with another galaxy may have triggered the colourful display...

the amount of water on earth is the same as it has ever been. the amount of fresh water as opposed to salt water is something around 5% of all water on earth is fresh.

we pollute it, and we stink it up, but you cannot "use up" water. polluted water evaporates as pure H2O gas, leaving behind all the impurities and pollution. this causes local groundwater to get filthy and not drinkable. it can be reversed. water is constantly recycled.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjpVQbNpGKo

once it goes to the ocean its practically gone..... show me desalination process that is environmentally feasable.

the line under "cloud formation" and "evaporation" that says "from ocean" would be where I would start looking for clues.

july 20 1969
the apollo 11 lunar module lands on the moon.

"The water cycle describes the processes that drive the movement of water throughout the hydrosphere. However, much more water is "in storage" for long periods of time than is actually moving through the cycle. The storehouses for the vast majority of all water on Earth are the oceans. It is estimated that of the 332,500,000 cubic miles (mi3) (1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers (km3)) of the world's water supply, about 321,000,000 mi3 (1,338,000,000 km3) is stored in oceans,or about 95%. It is also estimated that the oceans supply about 90 percent of the evaporated water that goes into the water cycle."

yeah, that's because there is more water in the ocean than the total volume of fresh water at any given time. thank fuck too, I don't have gills (yet).

it doesn't mean that the evaporation cycle has ceased or that we are experiencing net losses of fresh water due to the oceans.

mostly, my comment was about a "desalination process that is environmentally feasable". I found this "funny" (funny strange, not funny haha), since the environment itself is responsible for most of the desalination that occurs on the planet...

but nice cut and paste professor! I feel smerter.

who said anything about net loss due to the ocean? I was thinking more like, cities the size of Los Angeles using up to 40% of their available drinking water on their lawns......

I had a response typed out about how a desert environment NEVER has enough water (even more so when you stack a zillion people on top of it), but then overwhelming waves of apathy made me delete it.

the day that LA cracks off of the continental shelf and sinks below the waves is the day that I begin perpetually tittering like a school girl.

TEEHEE!!!

Four massive galaxies are colliding in the largest galactic merger ever seen, new observations reveal: http://space.newscientist.com/articl...iscovered.html