Plenty of schools are back in session starting next week, but roughly 47,000 students in Detroit’s public schools won’t be able to turn on their water fountains. The city’s public school district announced Wednesday it’d be shutting off drinking water in its 106 schools after tests showed high levels of lead and…

Public concern over hydraulic fracturing (better known as fracking) has often focused on the potential for this extractive process to pollute waterways. Well, a new study reminds us that fracking is messing with our water in more ways than one.

It’s a crucial compound when it comes to supporting life, but water has so many amazing properties that there’s a lifetime of experiments to try with what comes pouring out of your faucets. It’s common knowledge that water is an effective tool for dousing a flame, but did you know that you can use water to start a…

Here’s something to give even Goop’s “bio-frequency healing” stickers a run for the money of various rubes: A Canadian man successfully sold slickly marketed bottles of water with hot dogs in them as a miraculous cure-all for whatever ails customers at exorbitant prices.

Some residents of Flint, Michigan, were not happy when they found out last month Nestlé was going to pump more water out of a nearby spring and pay close to nothing—especially given that just a few days later, the state ended the city’s free water distribution program.

You may have heard the theory that asteroids are responsible for Earth’s water. You may also have thought, hah, there’s no way that asteroids could have brought all that water to Earth. But fake asteroid impacts are now demonstrating that, yeah, maybe they did.

Climate change could make drought a way of life in certain parts of the world. Though the prospect of “Day Zero” in Cape Town is being staved off, it’s far from the only city to suffer through a water crisis right now.

Following a bone-dry start to the water year, California saw some much-needed rainfall in the form of an atmospheric river last month. Now, even though the wet season should be winding down, the Golden State’s getting another. The moisture will boost the state’s rainfall totals but could actually shrink snowpack,…

CAPE TOWN—In the midst of a historic drought, Cape Town is looking for solutions both immediate and long-term to its water supply problems. Although the potential shut-off of Cape Town’s taps on ‘Day Zero’ is likely to be narrowly averted this year thanks to intensive water-saving efforts, long-term drought, coupled…

Over the weekend, I gave my eight-year-old nephew his first lesson on lead poisoning. He had never heard of the toxic metal, or the ways it can enter the bloodstream and lead to decreased IQ scores in kids and joint pain in adults. I’m sure neither had the children of Flint, Michigan—at least not until a major water…

The year 2020 is rapidly approaching, and with it comes a deadline for ocean protection.

California officials are considering whether the time has come for permanent water restrictions.

In the predominantly black city of Flint, Michigan, 12 people died and at least 87 people got sick between 2014 and 2015—the result of a deadly bacterial outbreak that was suspected to have been triggered by the same water crisis that saw lead leach into the water supply. A pair of studies out this week confirm this…

Parched earth and dust storms extend across much of the Theewaterskloof Dam, an area normally filled with several hundred million cubic meters of water sparkling under the Sun. Sand dunes, built up within the largest dam in South Africa’s Western Cape Province, almost completely bury parts of the barbed fence intended…

KARACHI, Pakistan—In Karachi’s western neighborhood of Orangi Town, stretches of desiccated, cracked earth run underneath single-story homes, and water sellers on donkey carts ply the streets with plastic jugs. Here, the water does not flow, pipes sit corroded and broken, and residents have learned to live without a…