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In a closed-door simulation, insurers played out their response to a mass disruption by China's Volt Typhoon hackers--and found a nightmare scenario. It's around an hour and 10 minutes into the role-playing game I've been invited to observe, a simulated catastrophic cyberattack on US water utilities, when the whole thing begins to feel less like a fun afternoon playing Dungeons & Dragons and more like a plausible threat to civilization. A full 24 hours of in-game time have passed since hackers disrupted 5,000 water utilities across the United States in this imagined scenario. Joshua Corman, the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency strategist serving as our dungeon master, stands at the front of a conference space in an office tower high above Times Square, narrating the latest updates to the game's participants, a few dozen insurance executives set up in six teams. All of them have gone disturbingly silent. It's about to get harder," Corman says. "I'm going to share a few things, and it's going to hurt." It is, of course, still the same April afternoon as when we started--but in game time, the second-order effects of widespread water outages have started to become clear. Food refrigeration systems are failing at cold storage warehouses. Water-dependent drug and chemical manufacturing has been bottlenecked, leading to insulin shortages. Data centers' cooling systems are failing, causing outages of cloud services. Most critically, 2,000 hospitals are without water, hampering patient care and in some cases leading to evacuations as HVAC systems shut down and the July heat--the game takes place just before Independence Day in 2027--bakes facilities. Worse yet, Corman is playing a looping video onscreen, at the front of the room, showing a burst water main: The hackers have managed to trigger not just IT disruption but also, in at least some cases, real physical destruction that will take far longer to fix. "Everyone downstream is without water pressure," Corman says. "There are no breaks in real incident response," Corman explains just before the giant water pipe starts gushing onscreen. "If you have to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom.

The Stream How does targeting water supply during war worsen the scarcity crisis? We explore why water infrastructure is increasingly being targeted in the midst of war and conflict. Water sustains life, but what happens when it is weaponised? In the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, desalination plants supplying millions in the Gulf have become targets. This reflects a growing pattern: water infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable as global scarcity intensifies.

Send the pool guy packing. One of these robotic buddies can maintain your water quality instead. Cleaning swimming pools is not fun. I learned this simple logic as a kid growing up in and around pools--it's the only way to survive summer in Houston, Texas. Four years ago, I became a pool owner myself, and I found that the rule still holds. Jumping into the pool on a hot day remains a rare treat, but if the pool is filled with leaves and dirt, that treat becomes a lot less delightful. And when the thermometer is reading over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the thought of laboring on the pool deck, scooping out debris with a net, is downright cruel.

In a world of plastic water filter pitchers, I tested two of the new generation of stainless-steel filter systems. I will admit that the popularity of those giant, stainless steel, gravity-fed water filters remained a mystery to me for some years--even as multi-gallon water filter systems from brands like British Berkefeld and Berkey seemed to proliferate equally among lovers of doomsday prepping and holistic wellness retreats. I have been testing much different breeds of water filters for more than a year now, including reverse osmosis filters and water pitchers. But often, the big water filter tanks have seemed as much like status symbols as functional items. If you see a big gravity-fed filter, you know the person in question is serious about wellness, survival, or both. What changed my mind about these big stainless steel filters was microplastics . Most water filter pitchers are made of BPA-free plastic. But as new research shows that bottled-water drinkers ingest tens of thousands of excess microplastic particles, wellness lovers have begun to look askance at water filters that are themselves made of plastic.

Snowpack levels across a wide swath of western US states are among the lowest seen in decades, even as regulators struggle to negotiate water rights in the region. States across the western US are facing record low snowpack levels in the middle of the winter season. The snowpack crisis, which could mean a drier, more wildfire -prone summer, is coming as states are racing unsuccessfully against a deadline to agree on terms to share water in the Colorado River Basin, the source of water for 40 million people across seven states in the West. "Barring a genuinely miraculous turnaround" in the remainder of the winter, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, the low snowpack "has the potential to worsen both the ecological and political crisis on the Colorado Basin, and then also produce really adverse wildfire conditions in some parts of the West." Data provided by the US Department of Agriculture show that as of February 12, snowpack was at less than half its normal level in areas across nine Western states--some of the lowest levels seen in decades.

AI's growing thirst for water is becoming a public health risk "Bubble" is probably the word most associated with "AI" right now, though we are slowly understanding that it is not just an economic time bomb; it also carries significant public health risks. Beyond the release of pollutants, the massive need for clean water by AI data centres can reduce sanitation and exacerbate gastrointestinal illness in nearby communities, placing additional strain on local health infrastructure. AI's energy consumption is massive and increasingly water-dependent Generative AI is artificial intelligence that is able to generate new text, photos, code and more, and it has already infiltrated the lives of most people around the globe. ChatGPT alone is reported to receive around one billion queries in a single day, pointing to huge demand at the individual level. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg.

Winter needs a low-sodium diet. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Every winter across most of the northern US, giant bags of salt materialize at grocery stores and home improvement retailers as residents and business owners prepare to combat icy sidewalks and slick driveways. But when it comes to salting walkways and parking lots, most people overdo it, which costs more than just cash; using too much salt can have surprisingly harmful effects on the local environment, water quality, and human health. When salt is applied to roads and sidewalks as a deicing agent, as snow melts, salt gets washed into streams, lakes, and wetlands.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Oyster larvae that grow in water with traces of common drugs such as cocaine, ketamine, and fentanyl are slower swimmers that appear more stressed. This new research indicates that the common drugs do have an effect on oyster larvae that are found in contaminated water. The results were presented this week at the Society for Risk Analysis' annual conference and published in the journal All sorts of pharmaceuticals, from pain relievers to illegal drugs, can make it into the water supply via human excretion, manufacturing plants, or if they are flushed down the toilet . While that water does go through wastewater treatment, pharmaceuticals can pass right through.

Accurate water quality assessment requires spatially resolved sampling, yet most unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) can collect only a limited number of samples or rely on single-point sensors with poor representativeness. This work presents a solar-powered, fully autonomous USV featuring a novel syringe-based sampling architecture capable of acquiring 72 discrete, contamination-minimized water samples per mission. The vehicle incorporates a ROS 2 autonomy stack with GPS-RTK navigation, LiDAR and stereo-vision obstacle detection, Nav2-based mission planning, and long-range LoRa supervision, enabling dependable execution of sampling routes in unstructured environments. The platform integrates a behavior-tree autonomy architecture adapted from Nav2, enabling mission-level reasoning and perception-aware navigation. A modular 6x12 sampling system, controlled by distributed micro-ROS nodes, provides deterministic actuation, fault isolation, and rapid module replacement, achieving spatial coverage beyond previously reported USV-based samplers. Field trials in Achocalla Lagoon (La Paz, Bolivia) demonstrated 87% waypoint accuracy, stable autonomous navigation, and accurate physicochemical measurements (temperature, pH, conductivity, total dissolved solids) comparable to manually collected references. These results demonstrate that the platform enables reliable high-resolution sampling and autonomous mission execution, providing a scalable solution for aquatic monitoring in remote environments.