A bipartisan group of senators led by Tammy Baldwin has introduced the PFAS Accountability Act. The Act would compel federal agencies to cooperate with local regulatory and municipal authorities in documenting, reporting, and mitigating PFAS contamination.

As the West Texas fracking boom continues to mint millionaires and turn dusty villages into boomtowns, the infrastructure in a remote region has been challenged in new ways. The electric grid and the roads are dealing with user loads at a different level that in the past, while conservationists and industrialists reckon with the ever increasing pressures in managing the water supply.

The Lower Colorado River Authority has joined the state’s lawsuit against Inland Environmental & Recycling over their discharge into Skull Creek, a tributary of the Colorado in Altair County. A hearing on a permanent injunction against Inland will be held on May 13.

Researchers have shed new light on the behavior of water under extreme temperature and pressure. The research has confirmed a longstanding theory of how the basic molecular structure of water might be altered under specific conditions. Using lasers, scientists observed that at high temperature and pressure the oxygen molecules in water form crystalline structures, while the hydrogen molecules continue to move rapidly within the structures, continuing to behave as a liquid. This black, hot ice might be a significant component in the cores of some planets, and could be the most abundant form of water in the universe.

California’s Water Resources Control Board has approved a new legal framework for regulation of state wetlands.