These days, the Department of Labor enforces roughly 180 worker protection laws, ranging from pay requirements to parental leave benefits. Other protections are supervised by agencies such as the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Below are some of the key federal protections offered to employees.
About 71 percent of the Earth's surface is water-covered, and the oceans hold about 96.5 percent of all Earth's water. Water also exists in the air as water vapor, in rivers and lakes, in icecaps and glaciers, in the ground as soil moisture and in aquifers, and even in you and your dog.
If Earth was the size of a basketball, all of its water would fit into a ping pong ball. How much water is that? It's roughly 326 million cubic miles (1.332 billion cubic kilometers), according to a recent study from the U.S. Geological Survey. Some 72 percent of Earth is covered in water, but 97 percent of that is salty ocean water and not suitable for drinking. There's not a lot of water on Earth at all, said David Gallo, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts.