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.
Which category does this fall into?:
- Fraud
- Incompetence / misunderstanding that wasn't cleared up prior to publishing an article
- Neither; this works 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.
so its making a shot of water ever couple days, provided its not too dry?
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.
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
I'm glad someone else pointed it out, I would be skeptical of these claims. It will always be constrained by thermodynamics and local humidity. And it seems to only absorb the vapor at night and then release water in sunlight. Even if it produces what they claim, it's still barely enough to supplant the daily needs, and the jacket is probably not worth saving half liter of water.
Not specifically about drinking water or jackets, but I've often wondered why air-conditioning condensate is plumbed into the sewer instead of someplace useful. An A/C is a water-from-air device, and they run in much of the year in most homes in the southern US.
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.
I know what you're saying and I agree, but now I really want to read a 12 paragraph story about someone's grandmother falling in love in Italy with a plastic bag.
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."
And thus, you've got the rest of it to have material that can fall under copyright law.
No, it's not just recipes. A lot of particularly American long-form journalism is writteh this way. So I just put this in Gemini:
> 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.
I really enjoy that the outbound links go through a redirect on nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com (as well as awstrack.me). Did the article author just copy the links they were sent by email without even opening them?
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.'
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.
If the collecting fabric was on the inside, you'd literally have a stillsuit. I can imagine there would be complications with it getting clogged by oils from the skin.
Plus, you know, completely ruining thermoregulation by preventing heat loss through evaporation.
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?
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.
I do wonder about the tradeoff between excess perspiration due to wearing heavier materials versus the ability to collect water, especially on the days where replenishing fluids is most crucial.
Collecting water with tarps is just strategic collection of condensation/dew. Clothing has the issue of often being warmer than ambient because people are warm blooded, so it's unlikely water would condense from the air(though it can condense on the inside from evaporated sweat).
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.
A Dune-style stillsuit is thermodynamically impossible. You can't both capture water and use that water to cool you via sweat evaporation. If you let it evaporate, it has to leave; if you capture evaporated sweat you also recover all the heat that it took with it. Those suits are equivalent to going out into the desert with no ability to sweat, and rather than extending your life, would kill you much more quickly.
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.
Evaporation cools things, that's why we sweat. Condensation heats things. Sure, a wearable dehumidifier may be novel, but does it sound like a good idea to wear a dehumidifier in conditions where you might want to drink the water from one?
You can wear silica gel since about 1918 - only needs some heat to get the water out and cold to condense it.
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.
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.
Which category does this fall into?:
Yea, usually the next step is starting a Kickstarter campaign and then rug-pulling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVsqIjAeeXw
The design seems reasonable. It seems like a scaled down version of this MIT one that uses similar principles:
https://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-...
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.
so its making a shot of water ever couple days, provided its not too dry?
you need to scale way way up, not down
A shot is ~ 35 ml to 50 ml, so one to three shots a day. :p
If a human needs about 1L per day on a minimal survival scenario, we're talking 20+ jackets right?
Just get your friends to wear them too.
who gets to drink today?
It's the new drinking game, obvs.
1.5oz in the US, which is about 44mL
That's about the average of 35mL and 50mL. ;)
Many thanks for your link to the article, it was a very interesting read; fascinating to learn how glycerol interacts with lithium salts...
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.
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
The salt is there to be hygroscopic, they don't want the salt out. The structure is there to keep the salt in.
Both devices handwave on how the cooling required to condense the water occurs.
I believe this uses absorption; not cooling [condensation].
Here's one that uses exotic materials that the developer got the 2025 Nobel chemistry prize for:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03875-w
It is a dessicant dehumidifier, useless for the same reason as this MIT/Berkley thing from 9 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns
I'm glad someone else pointed it out, I would be skeptical of these claims. It will always be constrained by thermodynamics and local humidity. And it seems to only absorb the vapor at night and then release water in sunlight. Even if it produces what they claim, it's still barely enough to supplant the daily needs, and the jacket is probably not worth saving half liter of water.
Not specifically about drinking water or jackets, but I've often wondered why air-conditioning condensate is plumbed into the sewer instead of someplace useful. An A/C is a water-from-air device, and they run in much of the year in most homes in the southern US.
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.
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.
I know what you're saying and I agree, but now I really want to read a 12 paragraph story about someone's grandmother falling in love in Italy with a plastic bag.
You've got to figure it's not like ordinary plastic, and probably not just anybody's grandmother either :)
You're probably talking about cooking/recipe blogs? I need those 12 paragraphs and all the ads to get to the recipe. It's dopamine.
Recipes themselves can't be copyrighted.
https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
And thus, you've got the rest of it to have material that can fall under copyright law.https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte... also goes into it.
Cooks and mathematicians are not allowed to make money. For everybody else we have patents.
But couldn't someone copy out the mere listing of ingredients anyway?
I had heard it's more about SEO. Put some filler on the page to make the article looking enough for the search engine to think it's intereting.
> intereting
Typo, “interesting”; “interneting” also works.
I mean we're talking about people who decided their life's work would be to run a recipe website so we already can't expect that much.
You don't know how many side projects they have. I had a recipe website at one time along with 50 other things.
No, it's not just recipes. A lot of particularly American long-form journalism is writteh this way. So I just put this in Gemini:
> 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.
This is good, however that first sentence needs to be removed, it's too factual and orients the reader too much.
This is where all the printer paper goes . . .
I really enjoy that the outbound links go through a redirect on nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com (as well as awstrack.me). Did the article author just copy the links they were sent by email without even opening them?
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.'
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.
If the collecting fabric was on the inside, you'd literally have a stillsuit. I can imagine there would be complications with it getting clogged by oils from the skin.
Plus, you know, completely ruining thermoregulation by preventing heat loss through evaporation.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UMtqy9_NbYg&pp=0gcJCUACo7VqN5t...
This will sell well on Arrakis
It’s far behind the Fremen made still suit. They will laugh at it.
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?
Anyone remember the self filling water bottle? Her you are:
www.fontus.at
Of course it did not work. And never hit the market
Makes sense since we're speedrunning the other parts of the Butlerian jihad
I don't know about the rest of you, but if somebody spots Shai-hulud out in the Sahara I'm outta here.
At the end of Dune.... Chani is heartbroken... Needing to get away...
Honestly, bring on Leto II. Fuck it.
Yeah apparently we need to get our ass kicked seriously to get our shit together to make it further and not die choking in our tiny blue spot.
Maybe not for 3500 years, but look what world WWII brought after it ended. We need that millennia-spanning perspective.
Out of here to where?
Outside of the environment?
Senator Collins: It’s not in an environment. It’s been towed beyond the environment.
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
The deep desert. As far from the pyons as the sands go.
After the datacenters ruin all the water, we will need those stillsuits.
Incredible innovation.
Wouldn't want to be drinking whatever this produces in the GTA though lol
Well technically it is distilled water so it will have a lot of pollution already removed
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.
I do wonder about the tradeoff between excess perspiration due to wearing heavier materials versus the ability to collect water, especially on the days where replenishing fluids is most crucial.
from what I can tell, you dont have to wear it?
I've heard of collecting water with tarps and assume this is like a vest form of that:
https://www.campingsurvival.com/blogs/camping-survival-blogs...
Collecting water with tarps is just strategic collection of condensation/dew. Clothing has the issue of often being warmer than ambient because people are warm blooded, so it's unlikely water would condense from the air(though it can condense on the inside from evaporated sweat).
I wonder if it has microplastics, but probably depends what kind of fabric was used
i guess this wouldnt work on arrakis
Sure it would, if it can capture the humidity evaporated from skin and breath.
MIT came up with a device that harvests water from air few years back. What happened to that project?
Where is my dune stillsuit ?
So the opposite of Marty's self-drying jacket in Back to the Future Part II?
Or an early version of the Fremen suits from Dune.
Fremen stillsuits have been in use for ages. This jacket is a copycat, but at least it means Frank Herbert has not been forgotten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stillsuit
works in the rain
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.
And a charging port for your phone.
My first thought was “yay a stillsuit” - but this grabs moisture from the air, not the wearer’s body. So no. No stillsuit yet.
A Dune-style stillsuit is thermodynamically impossible. You can't both capture water and use that water to cool you via sweat evaporation. If you let it evaporate, it has to leave; if you capture evaporated sweat you also recover all the heat that it took with it. Those suits are equivalent to going out into the desert with no ability to sweat, and rather than extending your life, would kill you much more quickly.
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.
Lisan al-Gaib!
But are you wearing it slip-shod, like the natives do?
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.
I mean, astronauts already do that - their urine and feaces are processed, water extracted and purified and used for drinking again.
Just wear it in reverse ;)
A big step towards a stillsuit anyways ;)
Vaporware has never tasted so good or been so refreshing.
Vaporwear*
This sort of thing can't work as it would break basic laws of thermodynamics. Best case it's a dehumidifier with extra steps.
Why would it break the laws? Per the article it uses the heat from sunlight to do some of its work, it's not some kind of magic fabric.
The thermodynamic issue is not that there's not enough energy, it's that the heat output has nowhere to go.
So a dehumidifier with extra steps.
"extra steps" meaning wearable dehumidifier. Are there other wearable dehumidifiers to produce drinking water? I don't think so.
A reductive assessment (to a specific feature) of a novel idea, does not make it less interesting.
Evaporation cools things, that's why we sweat. Condensation heats things. Sure, a wearable dehumidifier may be novel, but does it sound like a good idea to wear a dehumidifier in conditions where you might want to drink the water from one?
You can wear silica gel since about 1918 - only needs some heat to get the water out and cold to condense it.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns