A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air

(news.utexas.edu)

86 points | by ilreb 7 hours ago

18 comments

  • phyzix5761 3 hours ago
    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.
    • karim79 2 hours ago
      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.
      • shagie 1 hour ago
        Recipes themselves can't be copyrighted.

        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."
        
        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.

        • jstanley 1 hour ago
          But couldn't someone copy out the mere listing of ingredients anyway?
          • throwaway81523 1 hour ago
            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.
          • vasco 32 minutes ago
            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.
            • trick-or-treat 14 minutes ago
              You don't know how many side projects they have. I had a recipe website at one time along with 50 other things.
      • jmyeet 41 minutes ago
        [flagged]
  • the__alchemist 4 hours ago
    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
    • donkers 4 hours ago
      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.

      • 8note 2 hours ago
        > 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

        • toast0 1 hour ago
          A shot is ~ 35 ml to 50 ml, so one to three shots a day. :p
          • aidenn0 4 minutes ago
            1.5oz in the US, which is about 44mL
      • tentacleuno 4 hours ago
        Many thanks for your link to the article, it was a very interesting read; fascinating to learn how glycerol interacts with lithium salts...
        • sciencejerk 2 hours ago
          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

      • jojobas 1 hour ago
        Both devices handwave on how the cooling required to condense the water occurs.
      • aaron695 3 hours ago
        [dead]
    • throwaway81523 1 hour ago
      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

    • jojobas 2 hours ago
      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

  • bigiain 32 minutes ago
    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?
  • grugagag 3 hours ago
    This reminds me of Dune. Does this really work tho?
    • trick-or-treat 13 minutes ago
      When you kill a man do you get to take his water?
    • Ekaros 1 hour ago
      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.

    • aspicytaco4me 2 hours ago
      I honestly can’t believe the article didn’t mention dune.
  • erelong 3 hours ago
    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...

    • goda90 1 hour ago
      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).
  • johnnyApplePRNG 3 hours ago
    Incredible innovation.

    Wouldn't want to be drinking whatever this produces in the GTA though lol

  • PLenz 5 hours ago
    Makes sense since we're speedrunning the other parts of the Butlerian jihad
    • EarlKing 4 hours ago
      I don't know about the rest of you, but if somebody spots Shai-hulud out in the Sahara I'm outta here.
      • kreelman 3 hours ago
        At the end of Dune.... Chani is heartbroken... Needing to get away...

           Oh I'm a leavin' on a Shai-hulud
           Don't know when I'll be back again..
      • AnimalMuppet 4 hours ago
        Out of here to where?
        • whynotmaybe 4 hours ago
          Outside of the environment?
        • EarlKing 1 hour ago
          The deep desert. As far from the pyons as the sands go.
      • Loughla 4 hours ago
        Honestly, bring on Leto II. Fuck it.
  • keithnz 5 hours ago
    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.
    • brewdad 4 hours ago
      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.
      • keithnz 3 hours ago
        from what I can tell, you dont have to wear it?
  • throw678 2 hours ago
    MIT came up with a device that harvests water from air few years back. What happened to that project?
  • karim79 3 hours ago
    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.
  • b3ing 4 hours ago
    I wonder if it has microplastics, but probably depends what kind of fabric was used
  • loloquwowndueo 5 hours ago
    My first thought was “yay a stillsuit” - but this grabs moisture from the air, not the wearer’s body. So no. No stillsuit yet.
    • Kurd 5 hours ago
      Lisan al-Gaib!
      • ashton314 3 hours ago
        But are you wearing it slip-shod, like the natives do?
    • sanex 5 hours ago
      Seconded. I wonder which would taste better though.
    • 3eb7988a1663 5 hours ago
      Would you want it? I thought you were supposed to urinate and defecate in the suit so as to maximally retain moisture.
    • g-b-r 5 hours ago
      Just wear it in reverse ;)

      A big step towards a stillsuit anyways ;)

  • NopIdoN 4 hours ago
    works in the rain
  • SadErn 5 hours ago
    Vaporware has never tasted so good or been so refreshing.
  • ArchieScrivener 5 hours ago
    [dead]
  • niggischiggi 4 hours ago
    [dead]
  • jojobas 5 hours ago
    This sort of thing can't work as it would break basic laws of thermodynamics. Best case it's a dehumidifier with extra steps.
    • donkers 5 hours ago
      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.
      • jojobas 5 hours ago
        So a dehumidifier with extra steps.
        • Supermancho 5 hours ago
          "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.

          • jojobas 4 hours ago
            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