Tue 16 Dec 2025 08.00 ESTLast modified on Tue 16 Dec 2025 08.02 EST The sign outside Tom Hermes's farmyard in Perkins Township in Ohio, a short drive south of the shores of Lake Erie, proudly claims that his family have farmed the land here since 1900. Today, he raises 130 head of cattle and grows corn, wheat, grass and soybeans on 1,200 acres of land. For his family, his animals and wider business, water is life. So when, in May 2024, the Texas-based Aligned Data Centers broke ground on its NEO-01, four-building, 200,000 sq ft data center on a brownfield site that abuts farmland that Hermes rents, he was concerned. "We have city water here. That's going to reduce the pressure if they are sucking all the water," he says of the data center.

National Guard soldiers shot in Washington DC'terror attack' are named... as Afghan gunman's chilling 40-hour drive across the country emerges Patrick Mahomes' bizarre addition to his Thanksgiving meal leaves fans disgusted My book on the Kennedys was used as a'mistress manual' by Olivia Nuzzi... then this wannabe Carolyn Bessette had the nerve to hound me with these outrageous texts: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Bryan Kohberger becomes nightmare prison diva... as he throws huge tantrum over BANANAS behind bars Campbell's under fire again just a day after top exec was canned for soup ingredient bombshell Watch distressing moment'drugged' Tara Reid COLLAPSES... as friends reveal urgent developments about'surveillance footage': 'They should be prosecuted' Deaths from highly infectious virus are growing... as states brace for widespread outbreaks Karoline Leavitt's family member was swarmed by ICE agents while picking up son from school as child's father tell her to'self deport' Cuckolded ex of writer who'had affair' with RFK Jr rebounds with lookalike feminist... who hates men but fetches his coffee How my bifold doors nearly killed me. It's a middle-class status symbol, but a horrific danger landed me in surgery. Her people tell me extraordinary accusation is'highly defamatory'. Princess of Wales visits the Anna Freud Centre to launch new project supporting children's mental health Campbell's under fire again just a day after top exec was canned for soup ingredient bombshell READ MORE: Campbell's FIRES executive secretly recorded saying its soups are full of'bioengineered meat' and made for'poor people' Campbell's admission to illegally discharging wastewater into a major US river has resurfaced amid a scandal involving its iconic soup ingredients. The New Jersey-based company admitted in September that its Napoleon, Ohio, canning plant illegally dumped wastewater more than 5,400 times from April 2018 to December 2024, breaking federal water pollution laws.

Satellites do an incredible job of mapping algal blooms, the green mats that spread over lakes and oceans during warm, nutrient-rich summers. But the hypnotic, swirling images from space can't tell if toxins are lurking in a carpet of cyanobacteria, threatening the safety of water. Ecologists and hydrologists can test water's drinkability by boating through the blooms--though collecting samples off the side of a power boat is tricky and inconvenient. So this year, scientists are monitoring Lake Erie with a robot, 18 feet below the water's surface. The so-called Environmental Sample Processor, ESPniagara, sits on the floor of Lake Erie's western basin.

Satellites in space and a robot under Lake Erie's surface are part of a network of scientific tools trying to keep algae toxins out of drinking water supplies in the shallowest of the Great Lakes. It's one of the most wide-ranging freshwater monitoring systems in the U.S., researchers say, and some of its pieces soon will be watching for harmful algae on hundreds of lakes nationwide. Researchers are creating an early warning system using real-time data from satellites that in recent years have tracked algae bloom hotpots such as Florida's Lake Okeechobee and the East Coast's Chesapeake Bay. Satellites in space and a robot under Lake Erie's surface are part of a network of scientific tools trying to keep algae toxins out of drinking water supplies in the Great Lakes. The system in development will cast a wider net at a time when many states can't afford to monitor every lake threatened by harmful algae.

TOLEDO, OHIO – Satellites in space and a robot under Lake Erie's surface are part of a network of scientific tools trying to keep algae toxins out of drinking water supplies in the shallowest of the Great Lakes. It's one of the most wide-ranging freshwater monitoring systems in the U.S., researchers say, and some of its pieces soon will be watching for harmful algae on hundreds of lakes nationwide. Researchers are creating an early warning system using real-time data from satellites that in recent years have tracked algae bloom hotpots such as Florida's Lake Okeechobee and the East Coast's Chesapeake Bay. The plan is to have it in place within two years so that states in the continental U.S. can be alerted to where toxic algae is appearing before they might detect it on the surface, said Blake Schaeffer, a researcher with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "You don't have to wait until someone gets sick," said Schaeffer, one of the leaders of the project.

Adaptive sampling theory has shown that, with proper assumptions on the signal class, algorithms exist to reconstruct a signal in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ with an optimal number of samples. We generalize this problem to the case of spatial signals, where the sampling cost is a function of both the number of samples taken and the distance traveled during estimation. This is motivated by our work studying regions of low oxygen concentration in the Great Lakes. We show that for one-dimensional threshold classifiers, a tradeoff between the number of samples taken and distance traveled can be achieved using a generalization of binary search, which we refer to as quantile search. We characterize both the estimation error after a fixed number of samples and the distance traveled in the noiseless case, as well as the estimation error in the case of noisy measurements. We illustrate our results in both simulations and experiments and show that our method outperforms existing algorithms in the majority of practical scenarios.