Tag Archives: water

Feral equids (horses and donkeys) reintroduced to desert regions in the North American southwest regularly dig wells to expose groundwater, increasing water availability — and sometimes providing the only water available locally — for a wide variety of plant and animal species and ecosystem processes, according to new research led …

An international team of scientists has studied both the water and organic contents from a dust particle recovered from the surface of the near-Earth S-type asteroid 25143 Itokawa by JAXA’s Hayabusa mission, which was the first mission that brought pristine asteroidal materials to Earth. The S-type asteroid Itokawa. Image credit: …

Water suppresses vasopressin, a hormone linked to fructose-induced obesity and diabetes, according to a new study published in the journal JCI Insight. Andres-Hernando et al. suggest that increased water intake may be a beneficial way to both prevent or treat metabolic syndrome. Image credit: Bernd Scheumann. “The clinical significance of …

Water may emerge in connection with the formation of terrestrial planets, according to a new analysis of a Martian meteorite called North West Africa (NWA) 7533. An artist’s impression of the young Mars. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO / N. Risinger, skysurvey.org. “There are two hypotheses about the emergence …

Using the spectral data collected by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, a team of researchers has found a mixture of organic materials and water ice in nine impact craters on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. This colorized radar image, taken by NASA’s Cassini …

  Researchers confirmed a long-standing theory that there was water ice on the moon, according to a pair of studies published in Nature Astronomy. While water on the moon has been suspected for several decades, and multiple lunar missions have gathered data that pointed to its presence, definitive proof had …

  If you remember even basic elementary school geography, you know that Earth’s surface is mostly water. Scientists have disagreed about how all that water ended up on Earth. Was it all here when the planet formed, or was Earth a dry husk until asteroids and comets delivered water? A …

A type of meteorite called an enstatite chondrite has similar isotopic composition to terrestrial rocks and thus may be representative of the material that formed Earth. A new study published in the journal Science shows that these meteorites contain sufficient hydrogen to have delivered to Earth at least three times …

High-resolution observations from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft of mysterious bright spots (faculae) in Occator crater on the dwarf planet Ceres suggest the existence of a brine reservoir — which is about 40 km (25 miles) deep and hundreds of km wide — that emerged to the surface through long-lived cryovolcanic activity …

May Form Ammonia-Water Hailstones A new study suggests that during Jupiter’s violent storms, hailstones form from a cooled mixture of water and ammonia gas, similar to the process in Earth’s storms where hail forms in the presence of supercooled liquid water; growth of these Jovian hailstones, dubbed ‘mushballs,’ creates a …