gallons

Your city is a scab on the landscape: sidewalks, roads, parking lots, rooftops—the built environment repels water into sewers and then into the environment. Urban planners have been doing it for centuries, treating stormwater as a nuisance to be diverted away as quickly as possible to avoid flooding. Not only is that a waste of free water, it’s an increasingly precarious strategy, as climate change worsens droughts but also supercharges storms, dumping ever more rainfall on scabby, impervious cities.Urban areas in the…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Over the next two decades, Los Angeles County will collect billions more gallons in water from local sources, especially storm and reclaimed water, shifting from its reliance on other region's water supplies as the effects of climate change make such efforts less reliable and more expensive. The…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Each year, Philadelphia's waterways are forced to swallow a dirty mix containing 15 billion gallons of untreated sewage and rainwater during storms because of an antiquated city system, according to a report released Thursday by PennEnvironment. The waterways include the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, as…

NASA began testing winglets, upturned ends of airplane wings, in July 1979, resulting in a 6-7% fuel efficiency increase by reducing wingtip drag. Now a common feature on around 10,000 jets, winglets have saved over 10 billion gallons of fuel and reduced CO2 emissions by more than 130 million tons since the 1990s.Forty-four years ago this July, NASA began testing a technology that would become one of the agency’s most visible and beneficial contributions to commercial aviation – winglets, the upturned ends of airplane…

Popular large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are energy intensive, requiring massive server farms to provide enough data to train the powerful programs. Cooling those same data centers also makes the AI chatbots incredibly thirsty. New research suggests training for GPT-3 alone consumed 185,000 gallons (700,000 liters) of water. An average user’s conversational exchange with ChatGPT basically amounts to dumping a large bottle of fresh water out on the ground, according to the new study.…

A nuclear power plant leaked over 400,000 gallons of radioactive water in November 2022, but the public is only now being advised of the leakage. The leak occurred at Xcel Energy’s Monticello plant in Minnesota. It did not extend beyond the plant site and did not pose a threat to the local community, Xcel Energy assured. Xcel initially reported the leak of radioactive water to state officials and federal authorities when it happened in November of 2022. However, no public messaging was created at the time as…

Ford is celebrating one year of its all-electric E-Transit vehicles hitting roads with a slew of encouraging stats surrounding the EV. Since February of 2022, Ford E-Transit drivers have already completed more than 12 million miles navigating through the US and Canada, alleviating a huge amount of gasoline required for combustion vans of the same size. Lots more to unfold here from Ford, learn more below. The E-Transit was announced by Ford Motor Company back in 2020 as an all-electric…