The study, published in the journal Nature, found that Earth's wetland areas are getting wetter and dry areas are getting drier due to a variety of factors, including human water management, climate change and natural cycles.

Areas in northern and eastern India, the Middle East, California and Australia are among the hotspots where overuse of water resources has caused a serious decline in the availability of freshwater, and without corrective actions by the governments to preserve water, the situation is likely to worsen in these areas, the Guardian reported this week citing the study. 

The first-of-its-kind study used 14 years of observations from the US/German-led Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) spacecraft mission to track global trends in freshwater in 34 regions around the world. 

"This is the first time that we've used observations from multiple satellites in a thorough assessment of how freshwater availability is changing, everywhere on Earth," said Matt Rodell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland,

"A key goal was to distinguish shifts in terrestrial water storage caused by natural variability - wet periods and dry periods associated with El Nino and La Nina, for example - from trends related to climate change or human impacts, like pumping groundwater out of an aquifer faster than it is replenished," Rodell added.

Freshwater is found in lakes, rivers, soil, snow, groundwater and ice. Freshwater loss from the ice sheets at the poles - attributed to climate change - has implications for sea level rise. Freshwater, which is used for drinking and agriculture is one of the most essential Earth's resources.

The researchers found that while some regions' water supplies are relatively stable, others experienced increases or decreases.

"What we are witnessing is major hydrologic change," said co-author Jay Famiglietti of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

"We see a distinctive pattern of the wet land areas of the world getting wetter - those are the high latitudes and the tropics - and the dry areas in between getting dryer. Embedded within the dry areas we see multiple hotspots resulting from groundwater depletion," Famiglietti warned. 

Famiglietti noted that while water loss in some regions, like the melting ice sheets and alpine glaciers, is clearly driven by warming climate, it will require more time and data to determine the driving forces behind other patterns of freshwater change.

However, the GRACE satellite observations alone couldn't tell the researchers what was causing the apparent trends.

"We examined information on precipitation, agriculture and groundwater pumping to find a possible explanation for the trends estimated from GRACE," said co-author Hiroko Beaudoing of Goddard and the University of Maryland in College Park.

Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, were once considered a triumph of modern chemistry. Stable and versatile, these chemicals were used in hundreds of products, from military systems to the ubiquitous can of hairspray.

But soon it was discovered that the chemical endangers the protective ozone layer on Earth. CFC-11, the most common variant of CFC, is the second-most abundant ozone-depleting gas in the atmosphere because of its long life and continuing emissions from a large reservoir of the chemical in foam building insulation and appliances manufactured before the mid-1990s. A smaller amount of CFC-11 also exists today in older refrigerators and freezers.

In 2007, the world signed the Montreal Protocol, which banned the chemical's production. The treaty has been effective in reducing ozone-depleting gases in the atmosphere because all countries in the world agreed to legally binding controls on the production of most human-produced gases known to destroy ozone. As a result, CFC-11 concentrations have declined by 15 percent from peak levels measured in 1993.  

Though concentrations of CFC-11 in the atmosphere are still declining, they’re declining more slowly than they would if there were no new sources,  US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has found. 

A new analysis of long-term atmospheric measurements by NOAA scientists shows emissions of the chemical CFC-11 are rising again, most likely from new, unreported production from an unidentified source in East Asia.

“We’re raising a flag to the global community to say, ‘This is what’s going on, and it is taking us away from timely recovery of the ozone layer,’” said NOAA scientist Stephen Montzka, the study’s lead author. “Further work is needed to figure out exactly why emissions of CFC-11 are increasing, and if something can be done about it soon.”

The findings of Montzka and his team of researchers from CIRES, the UK, and the Netherlands, represent the first time that emissions of one of the three most abundant, long-lived CFCs have increased for a sustained period since production controls took effect in the late 1980s.

Montzka said the new analysis can't definitively explain why emissions of CFC-11 are increasing, but in the paper, the team discusses potential reasons why.

"In the end, we concluded that it’s most likely that someone may be producing the CFC-11 that’s escaping to the atmosphere," he said. "We don't know why they might be doing that and if it is being made for some specific purpose, or inadvertently as a side product of some other chemical process."

If the source of these new emissions can be identified and controlled soon, the damage to the ozone layer should be minor, Montzka said. If not remedied soon, however, substantial delays in ozone layer recovery could be expected.

In a series of tweets, SpeceX founder said he will present his vision for the future on Thursday in the US city of Los Angeles. "Boring Company Hyperloop will take you from city centre underground and ocean to spaceport in 10 to 15 minutes," Musk tweeted late Wednesday.

The Boring Company is an infrastructure and tunnel construction company founded by Musk in late 2016.

Musk has cited difficulty with Los Angeles traffic and limitations with the current 2-D transportation network as inspiration for the tunnelling company project.

In March, Musk said the company would readjust its plan to prioritise pedestrians and cyclists over cars, which would only be considered for transport after all "personalised mass transit needs were met".

SpaceX has got approval from the City of Los Angeles to build The Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, which will be used to explore Mars -- a goal that Musk hopes to accomplish by 2022.

Using the giant ALMA telescope in Chile, researchers were able to observe the distant galaxy MACS1149-JD1 when it was just 550 million years old, a time when it contained stars that were about 300 million years old, the study published on Wednesday said.

The galaxy's "red shift," a measurement technique that shows the distance to, and the age of astronomical objects, which was determined to be 9.1096, the largest value ever detected to date using spectral line analysis, Efe news reported.

The Japanese researchers arrived at that red shift measurement using the spectral lines of ionized oxygen instead of using ionized carbon, as is normally done in examining distant objects.

The results demonstrate the usefulness of ALMA as a tool for measuring the red shift of distant galaxies, Rychard Bouwens, an astrophysicist at Leiden University, said in another article in Nature.

The work of Takuya Hashimoto and his group at Osaka Sangyo University sheds light on the formation of the first stars and suggests that future telescopes - such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which will replace the Hubble 'scope in orbit starting in 2020 - could find new evidence on the formation of first-generation stars, Bouwens said.

Scientists believe that the Universe's first stars formed in regions of very dense matter, although understanding of that process is still limited.

Bouwens emphasized that it was still not clear whether the stellar activity detected in MACS1149-JD1 occurred in other regions in the early Universe, but he added that the discovery would spur similar studies of other galaxies

1. Experts believe that the consequences of the storm could be far more serious than the appearance of the polar lights.

2. The scientists have warned that the solar storm could affect satellite-based technology of the earth. In layman's terms, the planet might witness a partial tech blackout.

3. Solar winds, which are a stream of particles from the sun can heat the Earth's outer atmosphere causing it to expand. This can affect satellites in orbit, leading to a lack of GPS navigation and mobile phone signal.

4. The surge of particles can also lead to high currents in the magnetosphere, which can lead to higher than normal electricity in power lines, resulting in power failures.

5. The higher amounts of radiation also leave people vulnerable to cancer.

6. For the most part, the Earth’s magnetic field protects humans from the barrage of radiation, but solar storms can affect satellite-based technology.

7. Additionally, a surge of particles can lead to high currents in the magnetosphere, which can lead to higher than normal electricity in power lines, resulting in electrical transformers and power stations blow outs and a loss of power.

1. A geomagnetic storm is a major disturbance of Earth's magnetosphere that occurs when there is a very efficient exchange of energy from the solar wind into the space environment surrounding Earth.

2. These storms result from variations in the solar wind that produces major changes in the currents, plasmas, and fields in Earth’s magnetosphere.

3. The solar wind conditions that are effective for creating geomagnetic storms are sustained (for several to many hours) periods of high-speed solar wind, and most importantly, a southward directed solar wind magnetic field (opposite the direction of Earth’s field) at the dayside of the magnetosphere. This condition is effective for transferring energy from the solar wind into Earth’s magnetosphere.

4. The largest storms that result from these conditions are associated with solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) where a billion tons or so of plasma from the sun, with its embedded magnetic field, arrives at Earth.

5. CMEs typically take several days to arrive at Earth, but have been observed, for some of the most intense storms, to arrive in as short as 18 hours.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said that the storm could cause an aurora or polar lights when it arrives. NOAA has classified the storm as G-1 or 'minor'.

However, some experts believe that the consequences of the storm could be far more serious than the appearance of the polar lights. The scientists warn that the solar storm could affect satellite-based technology of the earth. In layman's terms, the planet might witness a partial tech blackout.

Solar winds, which are a stream of particles from the sun can heat the Earth's outer atmosphere causing it to expand. This can affect satellites in orbit, leading to a lack of GPS navigation and mobile phone signal. The surge of particles can also lead to high currents in the magnetosphere, which can lead to higher than normal electricity in power lines, resulting in power failures. The higher amounts of radiation also leave people vulnerable to cancer.

This will also be the first American inter-planetary mission to launch from California.

InSight will place a single stationary lander on Mars to study its deep interior and probe the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the Solar System including Earth more than four billion years ago. It will also probe the mysteries of Mars' deep interior and help answer questions about the planet's structure and composition.

InSight is also the first planetary mission to delve beneath the surface of Mars, studying the planet's interior by measuring its heat output and listening for marsquakes, which are seismic events equivalent to earthquakes on Earth.

Well, InSight will not be alone during its six-month cruise to Mars. NASA will also be launching a separate technology experiment known as Mars Cube One (MarCO) on the same rocket. MarCO, consisting of two mini-spacecrafts will trail behind and monitor the spacecraft's descent onto the surface of Mars.

InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight center in Huntsville, Alabama. The robotic Mars lander was originally planned for launch in March 2016 but had to be rescheduled following a persistent vacuum failure in the main scientific instrument.