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A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air (news.utexas.edu)
the__alchemist 9 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
brodo 15 minutes ago [-]
Yea, usually the next step is starting a Kickstarter campaign and then rug-pulling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVsqIjAeeXw

donkers 8 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 6 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 6 hours ago [-]
A shot is ~ 35 ml to 50 ml, so one to three shots a day. :p
aidenn0 4 hours ago [-]
1.5oz in the US, which is about 44mL
ssl-3 3 hours ago [-]
That's about the average of 35mL and 50mL. ;)
tentacleuno 8 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 6 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

murderfs 4 hours ago [-]
The salt is there to be hygroscopic, they don't want the salt out. The structure is there to keep the salt in.
jojobas 6 hours ago [-]
Both devices handwave on how the cooling required to condense the water occurs.
aaron695 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
throwaway81523 5 hours 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 6 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

dsego 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
phyzix5761 7 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 7 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 6 hours 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.

amelius 3 hours ago [-]
Cooks and mathematicians are not allowed to make money. For everybody else we have patents.
jstanley 5 hours ago [-]
But couldn't someone copy out the mere listing of ingredients anyway?
throwaway81523 5 hours 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.
thih9 2 hours ago [-]
> intereting

Typo, “interesting”; “interneting” also works.

vasco 5 hours 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 4 hours 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 5 hours ago [-]
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.

sgt 31 minutes ago [-]
This will sell well on Arrakis
grugagag 8 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of Dune. Does this really work tho?
Ekaros 6 hours 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.

regularfry 54 minutes ago [-]
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.

trick-or-treat 4 hours ago [-]
When you kill a man do you get to take his water?
aspicytaco4me 6 hours ago [-]
I honestly can’t believe the article didn’t mention dune.
bigiain 5 hours 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?
PLenz 9 hours ago [-]
Makes sense since we're speedrunning the other parts of the Butlerian jihad
EarlKing 9 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 8 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 9 hours ago [-]
Out of here to where?
whynotmaybe 8 hours ago [-]
Outside of the environment?
gambiting 2 hours ago [-]
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

EarlKing 6 hours ago [-]
The deep desert. As far from the pyons as the sands go.
9 hours ago [-]
Loughla 8 hours ago [-]
Honestly, bring on Leto II. Fuck it.
kakacik 2 hours ago [-]
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.

zombot 2 hours ago [-]
After the datacenters ruin all the water, we will need those stillsuits.
johnnyApplePRNG 8 hours ago [-]
Incredible innovation.

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

keithnz 9 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 9 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 8 hours ago [-]
from what I can tell, you dont have to wear it?
erelong 7 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 6 hours 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).
bitwize 2 hours ago [-]
So the opposite of Marty's self-drying jacket in Back to the Future Part II?
zelphirkalt 1 hours ago [-]
Or an early version of the Fremen suits from Dune.
zombot 2 hours ago [-]
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

throw678 7 hours ago [-]
MIT came up with a device that harvests water from air few years back. What happened to that project?
loloquwowndueo 10 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 10 hours ago [-]
Lisan al-Gaib!
ashton314 7 hours ago [-]
But are you wearing it slip-shod, like the natives do?
sanex 10 hours ago [-]
Seconded. I wonder which would taste better though.
3eb7988a1663 10 hours ago [-]
Would you want it? I thought you were supposed to urinate and defecate in the suit so as to maximally retain moisture.
gambiting 2 hours ago [-]
I mean, astronauts already do that - their urine and feaces are processed, water extracted and purified and used for drinking again.
g-b-r 10 hours ago [-]
Just wear it in reverse ;)

A big step towards a stillsuit anyways ;)

11 hours ago [-]
b3ing 9 hours ago [-]
I wonder if it has microplastics, but probably depends what kind of fabric was used
karim79 7 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.
NopIdoN 9 hours ago [-]
works in the rain
SadErn 10 hours ago [-]
Vaporware has never tasted so good or been so refreshing.
elgertam 8 hours ago [-]
Vaporwear*
ArchieScrivener 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
niggischiggi 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jojobas 10 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 9 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 9 hours ago [-]
So a dehumidifier with extra steps.
Supermancho 9 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.

vintermann 4 hours ago [-]
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?
jojobas 8 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

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