A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
news.utexas.edu
news.utexas.edu
Which category does this fall into?:
- Fraud
- Incompetence / misunderstanding that wasn't cleared up prior to publishing an article
- Neither; this works as expectedhttps://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-...
So my vote is for working as expected.
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
so its making a shot of water ever couple days, provided its not too dry?
you need to scale way way up, not down
Sweating keeps you cool, absorbing the sweat will cancel the cooling effect and you will overheat and may die.
> Compared with conventional water-harvesting materials, the textile showed a three- to 10-fold improvement at scale.
Technology Connections has a video on this general technique with a demo from a typical commercially available unit [0]
The "in a jacket" angle is novel... there's no blower. Even though this desiccant may be "3 to 10" times more effective, the passive nature is going to presumably make the rate of extraction quite poor compared to units with a blower to keep moist air moving over the substance.
Based on the wording, this improvement is due to some kind of gradient where moisture is collected on the surface of the jacket/textile, then channeled towards some internal chamber where the desiccant is constantly being heated to extract moisture - without the need to heat the exposed textile to extract water from that portion.
Of course increasing the rate of collection doesn't matter much on its own! You can't drink a damp textile. What takes energy is the removal of the moisture from the desiccant - and how much energy that requires is a detail suspiciously absent from the article (presumably because the efficiency isn't improved versus other desiccants).
So personally, I have trouble imagining this is as efficient as the blower-based commercial units, which are... far less efficient than "normal" compression cycle dehumidifiers (in the above video, real world testing shows the "normal" dehumidifier is 5 times more efficient than the desiccant one).
https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
How do I protect my recipe?
A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection. Note that if you have secret ingredients to a recipe that you do not wish to be revealed, you should not submit your recipe for registration, because applications and deposit copies are public records. See Works Not Protected by Copyright (Circular 33) (PDF, 113 KB), section "Names, Titles, Short Phrases."
https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte... also goes into it.
Typo, “interesting”; “interneting” also works.
> write the first 6 paragraphs of an imaginary news article that starts with a one paragraph hook and then has 4 paragraphs of a preamble story that has nothing to do with the premise. The last paragraph should somehow bring it back tangentially to the original point
and this is what it came back with. This is what reading a lot of articles feels like: padding word count with "flavor":
> TOKYO — A catastrophic logic failure in the global banking network has permanently erased all digital financial debts worldwide, throwing international markets into immediate, unprecedented chaos.
> Deep within the tranquil countryside of Wiltshire, Arthur Pendelton adjusted his favorite tweed cap against a surprisingly brisk autumn breeze. The 72-year-old retired carpenter had spent the better part of his morning inspecting a stubborn patch of moss creeping across his garden wall. For Arthur, the slow, predictable rhythm of rural life provided a comforting contrast to the frantic pace of the modern world he happily left behind. He noted with mild satisfaction that his prize-winning marigolds were finally showing signs of recovery after an unusually dry summer.
> Across the English Channel, Marie Dubois hurried through the cobblestone streets of Lyon, her mind entirely occupied by a sudden shortage of Madagascar vanilla. As the head pastry chef at a bustling neighborhood bakery, Marie knew that a Saturday crowd would tolerate many things, but a subpar crème brûlée was absolutely not one of them. She waved a brief, distracted greeting to the local florist who was busy setting out fresh buckets of lavender. A stray tabby cat darted out from beneath a café awning, briefly disrupting her frantic mental calculations regarding flour ratios.
> Meanwhile, on a remote research vessel drifting through the choppy waters of the South Pacific, Dr. Aris Thorne stared intently at a series of sonar readings. His team had been tracking the migration patterns of a specific pod of humpback whales for nearly six weeks with very little success. The ocean was uncharacteristically quiet that morning, save for the rhythmic thrum of the ship’s diesel engine and the occasional cry of a wandering albatross. Aris sighed, rubbing his tired eyes, and reached for a lukewarm mug of black coffee that had long since lost its appeal.
> High above them all, in a climate-controlled laboratory in Tokyo, a prototype cleaning robot named Sparky spun in a slow, confused circle. A minor programming glitch had caused the machine to perceive a perfectly clean linoleum floor as a vast field of hazardous debris. Its small rubber wheels squeaked rhythmically against the polished surface as it repeatedly attempted to sweep an invisible pile of dust into its containment bin. Two interns sat nearby on a break bench, completely ignoring the robot while they debated the merits of various local ramen shops.
> It was this exact, minor programming glitch in Tokyo that a central bank AI subroutine mistakenly flagged as a critical system override code. Within seconds, the error spiraled out of the lab, flooded the global financial mainframe, and executed the irreversible command that wiped clean the world's ledger books.
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.
Plus, you know, completely ruining thermoregulation by preventing heat loss through evaporation.
The typical design that I've seen plumbs the main condensate drain into the sewer, and usually has an overflow that dumps somewhere harmless if the main line clogs. (like out of the ceiling over the bathtub or out of an exterior wall in a visible location, so you can see it and fix it)
The few times I've seen the overflow, it's been quite a fair amount of water. Certainly enough to help with garden irrigation, if nothing else.
If you're looking at grey-water applications (e.g., watering plants, flushing toilets), this isn't a major concern. But if you were interested in drinking that water, you'd have to run it through additional filtration steps, and it would tend to clog those filters pretty quickly.
(I discovered this tasting the water from a household dehumidifier tank some time ago.)
The constant dampness also makes the same condensate tend to hold mould or fungus, which may not be especially conducive to health, whether of humans, pets, livestock, or even plants.
Climates in which A/C is most likely to produce a large amount of condensate (humid climates) tend also not to be especially water-constrained, so that the optimisation of salavaging A/C water is limited at best.
Not to say it's never useful, but there are more considerations than might be initially apparent.
Interviewer: But it must be somewhere… Well what’s out there?
Senator Collins: Nothing’s out there!
Interviewer: Well there must be something out there.
Senator Collins: There is nothing out there - all there is is sea, and birds, and fish.
Interviewer: And?
Senator Collins: And 20,000 tons of crude oil.
Interviewer: And what else?
Senator Collins: And fire
Maybe not for 3500 years, but look what world WWII brought after it ended. We need that millennia-spanning perspective.
Oh I'm a leavin' on a Shai-hulud
Don't know when I'll be back again..Wouldn't want to be drinking whatever this produces in the GTA though lol
www.fontus.at
Of course it did not work. And never hit the market
https://www.campingsurvival.com/blogs/camping-survival-blogs...
A big step towards a stillsuit anyways ;)
If they were externally powered you might get the numbers to balance, but they are explicitly presented in the book as powered by the human inside, which subtracts even more time from how long you're going to last in the desert before you die.
You can build a larger thing that recovers your water and cools you via some other method that uses external power, but I think you'd be hard pressed to ever beat just bringing more water with you. It won't be long before you're spec'ing a vehicle and not a suit... and then that vehicle should probably just bring more water, too.
On the more positive front, there is an interesting technology for potentially cooling the Fremen in the middle of the desert that could be based on something real: Paint that cools you by dumping your heat directly into space. Here's a video of it in action and what you might call a prototype of a "suit" that works like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKNOPlR2Yo While that YouTube video shows off someone using that paint on clothes, it seems pretty likely that that would not last very long. Paint on clothes is exactly as silly as it sounds for a long-term approach. But hypothesizing that someone could make clothing or suits based on this approach has the advantage of not being thermodynamically impossible, as evidenced by the fact that at least one substance with these properties actually exists. On Earth, that suit won't work in cloudy weather, but on Arrakis that's not a problem. Tapping the local human power to drive some circulation of either air or a bit of liquid cooling attached to some lightweight fins or some other sort of surface area on your back or something and you might just get a suit that could hugely extend your ability to loiter in a hot desert environment. You'd still need water, but much much less, or, the same amount could take you much farther.
A reductive assessment (to a specific feature) of a novel idea, does not make it less interesting.
Then again, why would you want to wear your dehumidifier (ok ok water harvester)? Is it for excursions into damp areas, so that you can then return to your dry home to extract water?
Then, I believe everything in this video still applies.
Like a life cycle analysis.
I understand it is about having access to water in dry places when you really need it, but still at some point these efforts forgot about something.