The Earth is literally covered in water, but 97% of that water is in salty oceans and not useful for drinking. In fact, only about 1% of the world’s water is really usable by humans (because a lot of fresh water is frozen in glaciers or otherwise inconveniently located). Here are just a few links on the lengths people could go to in order to get drinkable water.

• The United Nations held a design competition to create ads that help raise awareness of water conservation efforts. The winners will be picked in June. [url]
• A team of software engineers created a simulation that concludes it’s possible to tow an iceberg from the waters around Newfoundland to the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. The expense of actually doing this, however, has not been shown to be worthwhile by anyone yet. [url]
• IBM’s Almaden Research Center is developing new water filtration membranes for purification processes — which could be useful for desalination and other water reclamation. The trick is getting water purified without using a lot of energy to do so…. [url]
• A guy from Chile was arrested for stealing a 5-ton piece of a glacier — that he was going to sell on the black market for making designer ice cubes. Glacier ice just tastes way better than the ice that comes out of a plastic tray because it’s been aged for millions of years. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what’s floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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