Water makes up approximately 1.5 percent of the weight of the mineral — known as ringwoodite — which a University of Alberta graduate student found embedded in a commercially useless brown diamond mined from the Mata Grosso region of Brazil. The journal Nature published the results of ringwoodite analysis.

A water-rich mineral embedded in a Brazilian diamond provides further evidence that a vast water layer lies deep beneath the surface of the Earth. Canadian geologists discovered the mineral, which may have formed in a massive watery region within the Earth's layer known as the transition zone, which lies between 410 to 660 kilometers below the Earth's surface.

Geologists have debated the existence of water in the transition zone, but evidence seems to be mounting that the Earth has a vast amount of water in the mantle, the region between the core and the crust."This sample really provides extremely strong confirmation that there are local wet spots deep in the Earth in this area," said Graham Pearson of the University of Alberta in a press release. "That particular zone in the Earth, the transition zone, might have as much water as all the world's oceans put together. One of the reasons the Earth is such a dynamic planet is the presence of some water in its interior. Water changes everything about the way a planet works."

Another study published in Nature noted that the rocks of mid-ocean islands contained distinctive chemical signatures. The rocks' compositions suggested that these islands may have formed from liquid rock, or magma, squeezed up from the watery transition zone and dehydrated as it moved to the surface.

READ MORE: Vast Oceans Beneath Earth Revealed by Gem

Steve Perry, executive vice president of Visa Europe, has a different take on the folding stuff packed in our wallets that most of us take for granted. "Cash is expensive," he says. "We need to be using it less."
Expensive? Vintage wines, maybe. Designer clothes, yes. Modern art, almost certainly. But cash?
"Why do you think supermarkets introduced cashback?" Perry asks rhetorically.
He has me stumped there. I tell him I always thought of it as a service for overdrawn students to drive a few more sales through the tills.
"No," he responds politely. "It's because they want cash out of the system so there is less to manage. Processing a transaction on a card can be cheaper than handling cash."
Perry is a leading cheerleader for the cashless society. It's hardly a surprising role, but its an argument he is finding increasingly easy to make. Last month, for example, the Payments Council announced to anguished outrage that in 2018 the cheque would be dead.
"There are many more efficient ways of making payments than by paper in the 21st century, and the time is ripe for the economy as a whole to reap the benefits of its replacement," Paul Smee, chief executive of the Payments Council, said.
Perry extends the same argument to cash. Notes and coins are never going to be fully replaced, he accepts. Currency has, after all, been around in some form or another since 3,000BC. But now that we're in the electronic age, payments could do with a little catching up, he reckons.
Visa has recently published an extensive report on the cost of cash to society. Citing numerous independent papers by consultants and national governments, the payments company constructs a compelling case.

READ MORE: Is a cashless society on the cards?

Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.

The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware "implants." The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.

The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency's headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.

In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target's computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer's microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.

The implants being deployed were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps. But the documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system – codenamed TURBINE – is designed to "allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually."

READ MORE: How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware

REVEALED: How NSA Infects Computers with Malware

Gas networks in Eastern European countries, such as Ukraine and Belarus are less resilient than the UK during conflicts and crises, according to new research from mathematicians at Queen Mary University of London.
The authors suggest that a decentralised approach to managing congestion on gas pipeline networks could be crucial for energy security during geopolitical conflicts or natural disasters, for example.
"Natural gas accounts for 24 per cent of energy consumption in Europe," said co-author Professor David Arrowsmith from Queen Mary's School of Mathematical Sciences.
"Nations are now undergoing unprecedented change in the nature of energy resources and in their increased interdependency on each other for the security of supply."
Hypothetical scenarios that involve the removal of supply or transit countries from the network were used to create a model that analysed how nations and urban areas are affected.
The scientists found that countries in Eastern Europe are less resilient to a variety of crises than their counterparts in Western Europe.
They analysed the effect of supplying Eastern Europe from Norway and the Netherlands, during an imaginary crisis with Russia, and found that only 5 per cent of demand in Ukraine could be met, even if the West lowered its demand significantly.
They also found that Austria would be considerably affected in such a scenario, not only because of it becoming part of a new West-to-East corridor to supply gas to Eastern Europe, but also because of its considerable dependency on Russian gas.
However, the UK would be spared in a short-term crisis with Russia or Ukraine, but would suffer considerably in a potential crisis with Norway or a loss of supply from Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).
Co-author Rui Carvalho, Research Fellow at Queen Mary's School of Mathematical Sciences, commented: "Our decentralised control algorithm, which is inspired by mathematical models of internet traffic, manages any disruption automatically, by minimising network congestion in a way that is fair to all parties involved.
"However, to mitigate the effect of crises, nations must ultimately cooperate by sharing access to their energy networks."
Professor Arrowsmith added: "It is a serious challenge to provide informed comment on the resilience of the changing international energy supply and demand networks, not least in deciding the criteria by which governments and energy supply companies should operate for a beneficial distribution of resource.
"The paper is an attempt to develop a framework for fairness of gas network flow and a discussion of networks at a continental level. We hope that the paper provokes serious discussion."

READ MORE: Europe's resilience of natural gas networks during conflicts and crises probed with maths

Tuesday's extraordinary public criticism of the Central Intelligence Agency by one of the CIA's longtime apologists—Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee—is an expression of the terminal crisis of American democracy.
Only the direst of circumstances could have compelled the California Democrat to make a public declaration that the CIA "may well have violated the separation-of-powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution," and also "the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance."
Feinstein was evidently driven to make her protest over CIA spying on the Senate because the CIA made a criminal referral to the Justice Department, seeking to prosecute staff of the Intelligence Committee, and possibly members of the Senate themselves, for unauthorized use of classified documents. This was the culmination of months of wrangling over a massive report on CIA torture prepared by the committee.
There was a stark contrast in demeanor between Feinstein, visibly tense and seemingly frightened as she spoke for nearly an hour on the Senate floor, and CIA Director John Brennan, who arrogantly rebuffed her claims of misconduct in a speech to a foreign policy think tank a few hours later, then smirked through a press interview afterwards.
Feinstein has been an unquestioning defender of countless illegal and unconstitutional operations by the US intelligence apparatus, from CIA assassinations using drone-fired missiles, to FBI abuses under the Patriot Act, to systematic NSA collection of the telephone and Internet communications of the entire world.
There is a powerful element of hypocrisy, as NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden noted, "where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it's a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them."
But there is a more fundamental issue at stake: the mounting threat to democratic rights and constitutional processes that emanates from the military-intelligence apparatus of the US government.
For all the media publicity devoted to the political infighting between the White House and Congress, or the decisions of the Supreme Court, the real power in America is in the hands of an unaccountable, murderous apparatus of violence, provocation and spying that includes the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI and a dozen other such agencies.

READ MORE: The CIA, the Senate and the breakdown of American democracy

On the Black Forest's western slopes – in the land of cuckoo clocks and Brothers Grimm – there is a city that calls itself "green."
Rich silver deposits first lured settlers to Germany's Freiburg im Breisgau back in the 12th century, but today this quaint city is anything but medieval. Freiburg is a prototype for a clean-energy future that Germany is aggressively pursuing.

Nations across the globe are looking increasingly to wind, water, and the sun to power their economies in the decades to come. But Germany stands apart as a global leader in the industrialized world's push to limit fossil-fuel consumption. Forging a stable path to a post-carbon economy would be a watershed moment in human history – not to mention a tremendous economic boon for whoever finds the way. But it will not be easy to shift off the coal, oil, and natural gas that have powered global economic development for centuries.

In Freiburg – where silicon has overtaken silver as the city's focus – the energy transition is getting a trial run.

Solar panels line the train station's glassy facade, from which visitors alight into a bustling shopping district. Photovoltaic panels top the pitched roofs of churches, schools, and houses in sleepy residential quarters and help power the local soccer stadium and city hall. Students from all over the world study renewable-energy engineering at the University of Freiburg, established under the Habsburgs more than 500 years ago. After they graduate, they might get a job up the street at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, Europe's largest solar research facility.

Over the decades, Freiburg expanded its own clean-energy and efficiency infrastructure and worked with regional utilities that trade largely in wind, solar, and hydro power.

By 2011, when Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant rekindled anti-nuclear sentiments and prompted the immediate shutdown of Germany's oldest nuclear plants, Freiburg had already cut its carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 20 percent from 1992 levels. And it aims to cut 20 percent more by 2030. But even as it has built an economy and identity around efficiency and renewable energy, Freiburg gets only about 5.5 percent of its electricity from locally generated, renewable sources. The rest is a mix of renewable and nonrenewable energy from regional utilities. Plans are under way to install additional wind energy capacity locally and enact more efficiency measures, with the goal of using 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

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READ MORE: Germany's aggressive push for a clean-energy future