Welcome to Curiosity Daily from Discovery, my personal favorite place to get smarter in just a few minutes. My name is Nate.

Thanks so much for joining us today you guys.

We are excited to have you here with us at Curiosity.

I'm Kali.

Today you'll learn about a new way to purify water simply by walking, robots controlled

by liquid and rubber balls,

and an accident that led to a wild discovery about bumblebees.

Without any sort of ado, let's satisfy some curiosity.

We live on a world covered in water.

Nearly 70% of the Earth's surface, as we all probably learned in school, is covered by water.

But that can be a pretty misleading figure for anyone looking for a drink. Only 2.5% or so of that water is fresh

drinkable water. And I knew most of our water wasn't potable, but I didn't realize the percentage of

drinkable water was that low.

It actually gets even worse.

By some accounts, only around 1% of our fresh water is easily accessible.

The rest is either dirty, underground, or mostly locked up in glaciers and snow fields.

So we might have a world covered in water but only about 7% of it is available

for 6.8 billion people to drink.

We talk about water scarcity with some regularity,

but this really puts out scarcity into perspective.

I know there are all kinds of reasons why that number is actually getting lower

as we speak too, right?

...