Sunday, May 02, 2010

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Water

In May's Discover Magazine:

1 Water is everywhere—there are 332,500,000 cubic miles of it on the earth’s surface. But less than 1 percent of it is fresh and accessible, even when you include bottled water.

2 And “fresh” can be a relative term. Before 2009, federal regulators did not require water bottlers to remove E. coli.

3 Actually, E. coli doesn’t sound so bad. In 1999 the Natural Resources Defense Council found that one brand of spring water came from a well in an industrial parking lot near a hazardous waste dump.

See 4-20.