R with the tidyverse package is amazing once you get over the learning curve. It's so much easier to simply type a few lines of code then to fiddle with the Excel GUI, plus the ability to customize the plot is much, much better in R.
Yes making a simple plot in Excel is relatively easy, but try making something evening remotely complex and it's terrible. A box plot is a great example of this, 2 lines of plotting code in R for a basic plot but an absolute nightmare to create in Excel.
As stated in the article, this isn't a big problem for communities with centralized water treatment systems, rather for individual homes drinking well water which is contaminated by agriculture.
In a municipal treatment plant you have a few options for removing nitrates including reverse osmosis (membrane filters with very small pores, allowing them to reject very small molecules), ion exchange (swap nitrate with another, less harmful ion), or biological treatment (use microorganisms to turn nitrate into nitrogen gas).
In your home, reverse osmosis is really the only feasible option, which can be expensive to install and costly to maintain. Ideally, some sort of tax on fertilizer would be used to pay for these in house treatments, but that would increase the cost of food.
The US is a massive country friend, there are lots of places with combined sewers (domestic wastewater and stormwater) that will bypass treatment when there is a big rain event, especially in coastal cities that discharge wastewater to the ocean. It's not ideal but the alternative is massively oversized treatment plants or replacing all of the existing sewer infrastructure to separate the sewers. Both options would cost tens of billions of dollars in any of the large east coast cities. People are not willing to pay for that.
There are varying levels of Aphantasia, for my partner it is complete but for you if may only be partial. The wiki page I linked discussed it a bit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
My partner has Aphantasia. Brains are strange! She cannot visualize in her mind which makes it very challenging to do certain tasks and many things she does are based on muscle memory. Also interestingly when a song gets stuck in her head it is like she is making all of the sounds with her inner voice. For me, I can hear the song like there is a recording playing in my head.
Sadly this is pretty common. Here are some nasty pictures from a recent one in greater Vancouver.
I'm a water engineer with a PhD, so not a tech nerd but definitely a nerd :) I came here mostly because I find the Reddit app annoying and the app I was using came here.
You gotta flush the tap for a bit. When water is stagnant in your pipes overnight contaminants can leach into it (including lead if you have lead pipes or lead in your fixtures).
If you want to learn more about pre-contact Americas and the impact of the Columbia exchange, please read the book 1492.