Anyone who's dropped a cellphone in the bath knows that water and microelectronics don't usually mix well. But at IBM's Swiss lab in Zurich, marrying the two is becoming almost commonplace: microprocessors with water coursing through microchannels carved deep inside them are already crunching data in SuperMUC, an IBM supercomputer - with the heat that the water carries away used to warm nearby buildings.
A British parliamentary inquiry has heard that more than $650m ( £420m) worth of European Union aid to Africa may have been badly spent. In some cases, not enough local people were trained in how to maintain the necessary equipment - so after a few years it just stopped being used. But the biggest problem was finance - or getting long-term agreement from the communities and governments of poorer countries on how the water supply would be funded