Anthropologist Kirk French and civil engineer Christopher Duffy of Penn State report on a conduit designed to deliver pressurized water to Palenque, an urban center in southern Mexico, more than 1,400 years ago. "The ancient Maya are renowned as great builders, but are rarely regarded as great engineers.

Pueblo Reservoir has more water than it has for the past decade as managers move water from other storage facilities. The federal Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the reservoir, says it has 261,200 acre-feet of water, or about 85 billion gallons. That's the most since March 2000.

Some Obama administration officials have made clear their unease with the increasing control a handful of corporations have over the nation's food supply, and this week in Iowa they could show whether they are serious about changing the system. The first joint workshops on agriculture by regulators at the U.S.

A bill that could buoy or sink Colorado's rafting industry and affect hundreds of thousands of river enthusiasts and landowners may have floated through the House, but it's on the rocks in the Senate. The Capitol battle pits two core Colorado values against each other: the love of the outdoors and the allegiance to personal property rights.

Sen. Bruce Whitehead's renewable energy bill passed the Legislature on Friday in a 21-13 vote, but even before it passed, the bill generated enough heat to raise temperatures in the Senate. House Bill 1001 lifts the renewable power standard for Colorado's biggest utilities to 30 percent by 2020. It is one of Gov.

As winter melts into spring and McPhee Reservoir begins its slow ascent to full capacity, the placid waters conceal a raging battle with the hallmarks of history. Two major water providers, Montezuma Valley Irrigation Co.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., is the co-sponsor of a bill introduced Friday that will help municipalities and agencies fighting non-native invasive species that threaten Colorado's land and water supply. Those include tamarisk, zebra mussels, Eurasian watermilfoil and Russian olive, Bennet said in a press release.

Sixty years ago, the late Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield resisted helping to pay for Lake Lanier, a new federal reservoir being built north of town. Atlanta had plenty of water, he wrote Congress. Thanks, but no thanks. Those words came back to haunt Atlanta last year. A federal judge ruled that the city has been illegally tapping Lanier for years as its primary water source.

In a new study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), every single fish tested from 291 freshwater streams across the United States was found to be contaminated with mercury. "This study shows just how widespread mercury pollution has become in our air, watersheds and many of our fish in freshwater streams," said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

Lawyers for senior water-rights owners sued the state government Monday in La Plata County and five towns, saying the state engineer is failing to protect water-rights owners from gas and oil companies. Gas and oil companies remove water from the ground after they drill wells.