Water Quality

The Environment Agency is responsible for maintaining or improving the quality of fresh, marine, surface and underground water in England and Wales.Many human activities and their by-products have the potential to pollute water. Large and small industrial enterprises, the water industry, the urban infrastructure, agriculture, horticulture, transport, discharges from abandoned mines, and deliberate or accidental pollution incidents all affect water quality.

Pollution may arise as point sources, such as discharges through pipes, or may be more diffuse, such as from run off from streets and buildings, or agricultural nutrients lost from fields.We aim to prevent or reduce the risk of water pollution wherever possible, and to ensure that it gets cleaned up if pollution occurs that might lead to effects on ecosystems or people.

The Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) has overall interests for the quality of water in our taps, and local responsibility rests with the local authority environmental health departments.

Turgor pressure

Turgor pressure' or turgidity is the main pressure of the cell contents against the cell wall in plant cells and bacteria cells, determined by the water content of the vacuole, resulting from osmotic pressure, i.e. the hydrostatic pressure produced by a solution in a space divided by a semipermeable membrane due to a differential in the concentration of solute. Turgid plant cells contain more water than flaccid cells and exert a greater osmotic pressure on its cell walls.

Turgor is a force exerted outward on a plant cell wall by the H2O contained in the cell. This force gives the plant rigidity, and may help to keep it erect. Turgor may also result in the bursting of a cell.

Inner planets Earth

Earth (1 AU) is the largest and densest of the inner planets, the only one known to have current geological activity, and the only planet known to have life. Its liquid hydrosphere is unique among the terrestrial planets, and it is also the only planet where plate tectonics has been observed. Earth's atmosphere is radically different from those of the other planets, having been altered by the presence of life to contain 21% free oxygen. It has one natural satellite, the Moon (Latin: Luna), the only large satellite of a terrestrial planet in the Solar System.

OpenGL 3.0

The newest revision of the OpenGL API is OpenGL 3.0, released August 11, 2008 and is backward compatible with all prior OpenGL versions, though a deprecation mechanism has been introduced to simplify the API in future revisions.

• OpenGL Shading Language revision 1.30 (GLSL)

• Array Objects

• More flexible Framebuffer Objects

• 32-bit (single precision) floating-point textures and render buffers

• 16-bit (half precision) floating-point vertex and pixel data

• Ability to render vertex transformations into a buffer

• Texture arrays

• 32-bit (single precision) floating point depth buffer support

Full use of OpenGL 3.0 requires the same level of hardware as is required for DirectX 10 support. Unlike DirectX 10, OpenGL 3.0 does not require Windows Vista and can be used on any OS for which the appropriate drivers are provided.