Category Science

All living things depend upon water for their survival; life on Earth would not exist without it. A clean supply of water is essential for people, not only to drink but for sanitation and health reasons. There is plenty of water on Earth, but not everyone has access to the same amount. Demand for water is always increasing, and supplies in many parts of the world are overstretched. In such areas, supplying fresh water can be a time-consuming and expensive business. For many people, a safe, regular supply of water is taken for granted but without it life, and indeed industry, would come to a halt.

Water is a life giver – even a life creator. It lies at the basis of our understanding of how life works. It also lies at the basis of how we understand our own personal lives. Of the four (or five) basic building blocks of life, water is the only one with a visible cycle, which we call the hydrologic cycle. Fire has no cycle that we can see, either do earth or air. And we don’t understand spirit (the ether) enough to know if it does or not. Water is a constant reminder that life repeats.

The hydrologic cycle works as follows: From its most usable state, water evaporates and joins the air as water vapor. When the air cools, the vapor condenses and creates clouds, which help block heat from the sun. Colonies of the ice-nucleating bacterium, P. syringe, blown into the clouds by wind, help them to precipitate and fall as rain, snow, or hail. Much of the precipitation is stored on land as groundwater and lakes, snow and ice. From there water flows to the sea, where it joins the “primordial soup” again as ocean, ready to start the cycle anew.

Here are many of the roles that water provides both for the earth and for humans—that help produce the abundance of life we see around us every day. Without even one of these our lives would be far different.

Without water the air and earth would vacillate between extreme hot and extreme cold every day, everywhere, with a gradual increase in temperature as time goes on. Part of the problem with global warming could be that we are using up too much land water and throwing rain away into the sea.

In addition to being the soup from which life emerged, the ocean and other water bodies act as home for more life than what lives on land. Mammals, fish, birds, insects, trees, plants, algae, krill, and many other forms of life either live directly in water or are wholly dependent upon it for survival. This includes the tiny iceworms, copepods, and diatoms that inhabit trillions of minuscule tunnels in icebergs and their undersides, providing food for whales and fish that migrate to the poles to eat.

Water and carbon dioxide are the two key components of plant photosynthesis, which is how plants make their food. Bees use water to make honey, flowers use water to make nectar, trees use water to make pitch, spiders and snakes use water to make venom, and termites mix saliva with mud to make their homes. Humans use water to make paint, dyes, inks, all kinds of drinks, and we bottle it straight. We use it for paper, fabrics, food processing, chemical compounds, and the manufacture of hundreds of other products essential to modern living.

Without water, plants and many insects and arthropods could not survive, nor would humans have developed the foods and industries we have.

To humans, as creators of our own lives, water is our servant. We use it to grow crops and livestock, to cleanse and keep ourselves healthy, to stimulate ideas for products, and to transport those products. We use its cycles to remind us that our own lives also work in cycles.

But if we abuse water, like masters have a tendency to do with servants, if we don’t care for it and preserve it, we will end up destroying ourselves. We need the rain forests, the swamplands, the open rivers and lakes, the estuaries, icebergs, snow tops—water in all its natural forms we need. And so does the rest of life.

If, instead of commanding it, we could conceive of ourselves as a partner or an intelligent component of water’s own rain and storage cycle, it might encourage us to be more respectful of what water can do and more careful of the way we utilize it.

With water, we thrive. Without water, there is no life. We must learn to value, conserve, and take care of the water we have.

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Water is supplied into most homes by underground pipes. It starts its journey in a lake or man-made reservoir and passes through a process of purification before Coming out of the tap in your home.

Collection

The water that flows from your tap is collected from the skies and they fall in the form of snow, rain or hail. The water from the sky goes through the process of collection, storage, cleaning until it is safe enough for drinking. Once the water is safe for drinking then it gets pumped to pipes and flows out of your tap. Other sources of water are deep wells, reservoirs, streams and rivers.

Cleaning

The water that is collected goes through the cleaning and treatment process. The first step in the cleaning process is when the water passes through a large sieve that captures and takes out the debris and dirt from the water. The water goes through a combined physical and chemical process to get rid of the impurities that are left in the water.

Any remnants of bacteria or germs are completely removed to make sure that the water is safe for drinking. The bacteria are removed through the disinfection process using ozone, chlorine or with ultraviolet treatment.

Storage and Delivery

Once the water is thoroughly clean, it is transferred from the water treatment facility to the storage tanks that are covered. The water storage tanks are placed on higher grounds so that there is adequate pressure for the water to flow from the pipes and out of the faucets.

The water mains transport the water up to a point outside your home. The water is then transported into your home by the service pipe that is connected to the valve. The valve is often located under the pavement and it is used to turn off the water when there are maintenance checks or repairs.

Another valve can also be installed inside your home particularly under the kitchen sink. The valve inside your home is used to turn off the water when your indoor plumbing needs repairs.

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Glass is one of the world’s oldest man-made materials. It is made from sand that is heated, mixed with other materials, and then shaped as it cools. Glass is easily shaped, cheap to make and easy to recycle over and over again. It has a huge range of used from buildings and optical instruments to bottles and glasses. Modern communication systems rely heavily on fibre-optic cables, which are made from very fine glass fibres.

Glass is a non-crystalline, often transparent amorphous solid that has widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in, for example, window panes, tableware, optics, and optoelectronics. The most familiar, and historically the oldest, types of manufactured glass are “silicate glasses” based on the chemical compound silica (silicon dioxide, or quartz), the primary constituent of sand. The term glass, in popular usage, is often used to refer only to this type of material, which is familiar from use as window glass and glass bottles. Of the many silica-based glasses that exist, ordinary glazing and container glass is formed from a specific type called soda-lime glass, composed of approximately 75% silicon dioxide (SiO2), sodium oxide (Na2O) from sodium carbonate (Na2CO3), calcium oxide (CaO), also called lime, and several minor additives.

Many applications of silicate glasses derive from their optical transparency, giving rise to their primary use as window panes. Glass will transmit, reflect and refract light; these qualities can be enhanced by cutting and polishing to make optical lenses, prisms, fine glassware, and optical fibers for high speed data transmission by light. Glass can be coloured by adding metal salts, and can also be painted and printed with vitreous enamels. These qualities have led to the extensive use of glass in the manufacture of art objects and in particular, stained glass windows.

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Iron has been extracted from iron ore since around 1500BC. Most iron is now turned into steel because this is a much more flexible metal. Steel is made by removing more carbon from the iron and adding other metals, depending on the type of steel that is being produced. Steel is made in an oxygen furnace. Molten iron mixed with scrap steel k poured into a furnace and oxygen is blown over it. The oxygen mixes with the carbon and removes it in the form of carbon monoxide.

Steel is iron that has most of the impurities removed. Steel also has a consistent concentration of carbon throughout (0.5 to 1.5 percent). Impurities like silica, phosphorous and sulfur weaken steel tremendously, so they must be eliminated. The advantage of steel over iron is greatly improved strength.

The open-hearth furnace is one way to create steel from pig iron. The pig iron, limestone and iron ore go into an open-hearth furnace. It is heated to about 1,600 degrees F (871 degrees C). The limestone and ore form a slag that floats on the surface. Impurities, including carbon, are oxidized and float out of the iron into the slag. When the carbon content is right, you have carbon steel.

Another way to create steel from pig iron is the Bessemer process, which involves the oxidation of the impurities in the pig iron by blowing air through the molten iron in a Bessemer converter. The heat of oxidation raises the temperature and keeps the iron molten. As the air passes through the molten pig iron, impurities unite with the oxygen to form oxides. Carbon monoxide burns off and the other impurities form slag.

However, most modern steel plants use what’s called a basic oxygen furnace to create steel. The advantage is speed, as the process is roughly 10 times faster than the open-hearth furnace. In these furnaces, high-purity oxygen blows through the molten pig iron, lowering carbon, silicon, manganese and phosphorous levels. The addition of chemical cleaning agents called fluxes help to reduce the sulfur and phosphorous levels.

A variety of metals might be alloyed with the steel at this point to create different properties. For example, the addition of 10 to 30 percent chromium creates stainless steel, which is very resistant to rust. The addition of chromium and molybdenum creates chrome-moly steel, which is strong and light.

When you think about it, there are two accidents of nature that have made it much easier for human technology to advance and flourish. One is the huge availability of iron ore. The second is the accessibility of vast quantities of oil and coal to power the production of iron. Without iron and energy, we probably would not have gotten nearly as far as we have today.

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