I appreciate this style of writing. Straight to the point. No 12 paragraphs about someone's grandmother falling in love in Italy with a plastic bag.
Nearly all passive water-from-air devices described in articles are based on false claims. Peltier-based, desiccant/absorption/adsorption based, etc. All end up not working, or not existing. This has been common for ~10 years.<p>Which category does this fall into?:<p><pre><code> - Fraud
- Incompetence / misunderstanding that wasn't cleared up prior to publishing an article
- Neither; this works as expected</code></pre>
The design seems reasonable. It seems like a scaled down version of this MIT one that uses similar principles:<p><a href="https://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-drinking-water-0611" rel="nofollow">https://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-...</a><p>So my vote is for working as expected.
> Over this period, the device worked across a range of humidities, from 21 to 88 percent, and produced between 57 and 161.5 milliliters of drinking water per day. Even in the driest conditions, the device harvested more water than other passive and some actively powered designs.<p>so its making a shot of water ever couple days, provided its not too dry?<p>you need to scale way way up, not down
Many thanks for your link to the article, it was a very interesting read; fascinating to learn how glycerol interacts with lithium salts...
<i>The team’s new design significantly limits salt leakage. Within the hydrogel itself, they included an extra ingredient: glycerol, a liquid compound that naturally stabilizes salt, keeping it within the gel rather than letting it crystallize and leak out with the water. The hydrogel itself has a microstructure that lacks nanoscale pores, which further prevents salt from escaping the material. The salt levels in the water they collected were below the standard threshold for safe drinking water, and significantly below the levels produced by many other hydrogel-based designs.</i><p>So uh, how do they get the salt out of the nanostructure? This design seems amazing but it seems like many of these designs have issues with salts accumulating and clogging up parts thereby requiring some manual maintenance or replacement parts
Both devices handwave on how the cooling required to condense the water occurs.
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Here's one that uses exotic materials that the developer got the 2025 Nobel chemistry prize for:<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03875-w" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03875-w</a>
It is a dessicant dehumidifier, useless for the same reason as this MIT/Berkley thing from 9 years ago.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns</a>
This reminds me of Dune. Does this really work tho?
Most likely not. Hard part really is rejecting the heat involved in phase change of water from vapor to liquid. You have to effectively dump that energy somewhere and all the time you do not you don't get liquid water.'<p>It sounds easy, but eventually you can heat up whatever you use as heat sink and then you have to wait for that to cool.
When you kill a man do you get to take his water?
I honestly can’t believe the article didn’t mention dune.
So I assume Amazon will have all their warehouse workers forced to wear these, and collect all the captured water to feed into AI datacenter cooling systems?
Incredible innovation.<p>Wouldn't want to be drinking whatever this produces in the GTA though lol
Makes sense since we're speedrunning the other parts of the Butlerian jihad
I've heard of collecting water with tarps and assume this is like a vest form of that:<p><a href="https://www.campingsurvival.com/blogs/camping-survival-blogs/water-from-thin-air-how-to-harvest-fog-and-dew-in-post-collapse-environments" rel="nofollow">https://www.campingsurvival.com/blogs/camping-survival-blogs...</a>
depending on actual conditions you are in, it could potentially double (or more) the time before you die of thirst if it was your only source of water.
MIT came up with a device that harvests water from air few years back. What happened to that project?
Assuming it's an "all-weather" jacket I think it would be cool for it to spout out umbrellas when it starts raining, batman style, to catch rain water as well and drop it into pouches. Mp3 player would be great as well.
I wonder if it has microplastics, but probably depends what kind of fabric was used
My first thought was “yay a stillsuit” - but this grabs moisture from the air, not the wearer’s body. So no. No stillsuit yet.
Lisan al-Gaib!
Seconded. I wonder which would taste better though.
Would you want it? I thought you were supposed to urinate and defecate in the suit so as to maximally retain moisture.
Just wear it in reverse ;)<p>A big step towards a stillsuit anyways ;)
works in the rain
Vaporware has never tasted so good or been so refreshing.
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This sort of thing can't work as it would break basic laws of thermodynamics. Best case it's a dehumidifier with extra steps.