Free Republic

At first sight, the nearly four acres of farmland in this rural hamlet in northeast Haiti resembles more of a desert than a thriving agricultural experiment. The soil is brown and barren, battered by a lack of water and neglect. But walk further inland and the seemingly lifeless terrain soon turns green: Cabbages and pumpkins rise out of the ground, papayas hang from trees and workers plant rows of hot peppers in the freshly plowed dirt as a generator hisses in the background. A year ago, such a lush landscape was unimaginable for Fransik Monchèr, a farmer and father of...

Citizens of Louisiana and Mississippi south of the Old River Control Structure don’t need all that water. All it does is cause flooding and massive tax expenditures to repair and strengthen dikes. The best solution would be for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build an aqueduct from the Old River Control Structure on the Mississippi to Lake Powell, fill it, and then send more water from there down the Colorado to fill lake Mead. About 4.5 million/gals a second flow past that structure on the Mississippi. As mentioned, New Orleans has a problem with that much water anyway,...

Some plants emit a high frequency distress sound when they are placed under environmental stress, a team of researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel has found. The team, led by Itzhak Khait, examined the sounds emitted by tomato and tobacco plants when stressed by insufficient water or when their stems are cut. Microphones recorded ultrasonic sounds between 20 and 100 kilohertz emitted by the plants in both cases, the study found. The sounds emitted by the stressed plants are at frequencies unable to be heard by humans, however the team of scientists believes “some organisms” can hear the sounds...

In a rare turn of events, Israel received almost unanimous support at the United Nations last week for its proposal to further the dissemination of agricultural and farming technology to developing African nations. Despite of the humanitarian nature of the proposal, it was met with vehement opposition from representatives of Arab nations, including some that will be helped by the proposal. Regardless of the aid the proposal would provide to African countries who are suffering from drought and malnutrition, Arab nations, some of whom sit on the United Nations human rights council, did not vote in favor of the proposal...

From a distance, the reservoir appears topped by a flotilla of rubber duckies. On closer inspection, the water’s surface is packed with thousands of free-floating, 13-inch plastic balls, clustered to form an undulating cover. Developed by the Israeli startup Neotop (formerly known as Top-It-Up), the mass of balls serves as a floating cooling tower, reducing surface temperatures, algae and evaporation up to 95 percent. It’s one of many potential water-saving solutions to come out of Israel’s high-tech dream factory. This could make a difference in California. With the state’s reservoirs at historic lows — the two biggest, Shasta Lake and...

n a Mediterranean beach 10 miles south of Tel Aviv, Israel, a vast new industrial facility hums around the clock. It is the world’s largest modern seawater desalination plant, providing 20 percent of the water consumed by the country’s households. Built for the Israeli government by Israel Desalination Enterprises, or IDE Technologies, at a cost of around $500 million, it uses a conventional desalination technology called reverse osmosis (RO). Thanks to a series of engineering and materials advances, however, it produces clean water from the sea cheaply and at a scale never before achieved. Worldwide, some 700 million people don’t...

<p>The Israeli water industry took over the convention center here this week to show the world its bacterial sewage scrubbers and computerized shower heads, its low-flow nipples to grow high-yield tomatoes, and its early-warning mathematical algorithms to detect dribbles, leaks and bursts.</p>