With drought looming, Sri Lanka tries something new: preparing

COLOMBO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – With rainfall in many areas just a third of that last year and many water reservoirs far below normal levels, Sri Lankans have begun holding traditional ceremonies to invoke rain – some with the participation of President Maithripala Sirisena.

But this time, national officials are also doing something new to prepare for what many fear could be the worst drought in decades: Developing plans, in advance, to deal with it.

Those include everything from allowing communities to take only drinking water from drying reservoirs to removing taxes on imported rice and looking for alternatives to hydropower to maintain the national electric…

A Promising New Method For Cleaning Up the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

Hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive water remain sitting around the site of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan. But scientists can’t simply dump the liquid into the ocean, and if it continues sitting around, it could seep into the soil.

A team of scientists from Rice University in Texas and Kazan University in Russia have a clever idea to get the radioactive strontium and…