Word: watered
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That, at least, had long been the conventional wisdom, but in recent years, scientists have come to learn that by some measures, the solar system fairly sloshes with water. Mars, we now know, was once as wet as Earth and still harbors ice and perhaps liquid water. The moon is thought to have water locked in permafrost at its poles. Jupiter's moon Europa is probably home to a globe-girdling ocean beneath a thin rind of ice, and its Jovian sisters Callisto and Ganymede appear to be icy and wet too. Now, according to new findings by the Cassini...
...only is the ice made of ordinary water, but it's salt water, with sodium turning up in the samples no matter how many times the ring material was retested. "Our measurements imply that besides table salt, the grains also contain carbonates like soda," says Frank Postberg, a Cassini scientist working at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. (See a photo-essay of the world's most competitive space programs...
...biologists, that's huge. The only way to account for that particular chemistry is if the salts have dissolved out of rocks in the interior of Enceladus into a large quantity of standing water, as would occur if the moon had a subsurface ocean. "Both components [table salt and carbonates] are in concentrations that match the predicted composition of an Enceladus ocean," says Postberg. "The carbonates also provide a slightly alkaline pH value, which could provide a suitable environment on Enceladus for life precursors...
...moon that hangs in the frigid depths of the solar system could keep water in a liquid state is not much of a mystery. Too small to have a molten core and too far from the sun to feel even a flicker of its heat, Enceladus does have other moons - principally outlying Tethys and Dione - orbiting nearby. Each time those moons pass, they give Enceladus a gravitational tug, which causes it to flex slightly. Do that enough times - and the 4 billion years the solar system has been around is more than enough - and the pulsing moon heats...
...frogs and women in one Uttar Pradesh village tying themselves to the yoke to plough land in efforts to please the rain gods. Even farmers in irrigated areas that are not completely dependent on the monsoon are worried. "We keep reading in the papers that the level of water in the dams is falling by a foot every day," says Balbir Singh, a farmer in the Jalandhar district of Punjab, which lies in the northern belt considered India's bread basket. (See pictures of the deadly 2007 monsoon floods...