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A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
- bigiain 4mo agoSo 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?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- loloquwowndueo 4mo agoMy first thought was “yay a stillsuit” - but this grabs moisture from the air, not the wearer’s body. So no. No stillsuit yet.
- sanex 4mo agoSeconded. I wonder which would taste better though.
- Kurd 4mo agoLisan al-Gaib!
- ashton314 4mo agoBut are you wearing it slip-shod, like the natives do?
- g-b-r 4mo agoJust wear it in reverse ;) A big step towards a stillsuit anyways ;)
- 3eb7988a1663 4mo agoWould you want it? I thought you were supposed to urinate and defecate in the suit so as to maximally retain moisture.
- gambiting 4mo agoI mean, astronauts already do that - their urine and feaces are processed, water extracted and purified and used for drinking again.
- jerf 4mo agoA 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 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.
- mncharity 4mo agoThat's "passive daytime radiative cooling" for the curious. Supporting sweat, durability, non-toxic, existing textile tech, etc, gets hard. Or perhaps, like radiator-free ships in The Expanse, Dune just didn't want to show Fremen looking like butterflies.
- ArchieScrivener 4mo ago[dead]
- SadErn 4mo agoVaporware has never tasted so good or been so refreshing.
- elgertam 4mo agoVaporwear*
- jojobas 4mo agoThis sort of thing can't work as it would break basic laws of thermodynamics. Best case it's a dehumidifier with extra steps.
- donkers 4mo agoWhy 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 4mo agoSo a dehumidifier with extra steps.
- Supermancho 4mo 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 4mo agoYou 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns
- vintermann 4mo agoEvaporation 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?
- 4mo ago
- PLenz 4mo agoMakes sense since we're speedrunning the other parts of the Butlerian jihad
- EarlKing 4mo agoI don't know about the rest of you, but if somebody spots Shai-hulud out in the Sahara I'm outta here.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoOut of here to where?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- whynotmaybe 4mo agoOutside of the environment?
- gambiting 4mo agoSenator 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 4mo agoThe deep desert. As far from the pyons as the sands go.
- Loughla 4mo agoHonestly, bring on Leto II. Fuck it.
- keithnz 4mo agodepending 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.
- b3ing 4mo agoI wonder if it has microplastics, but probably depends what kind of fabric was used
- niggischiggi 4mo ago[dead]
- the__alchemist 4mo agoNearly 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 4mo agoThe 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-drinking-water-0611 https://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-... So my vote is for working as expected.
- tentacleuno 4mo agoMany thanks for your link to the article, it was a very interesting read; fascinating to learn how glycerol interacts with lithium salts...
- sciencejerk 4mo agoThe 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 4mo ago
- NopIdoN 4mo agoworks in the rain
- grugagag 4mo agoThis reminds me of Dune. Does this really work tho?
- aspicytaco4me 4mo agoI honestly can’t believe the article didn’t mention dune.
- Ekaros 4mo agoMost 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.
- trick-or-treat 4mo agoWhen you kill a man do you get to take his water?
- regularfry 4mo agoIf 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.
- johnnyApplePRNG 4mo agoIncredible innovation. Wouldn't want to be drinking whatever this produces in the GTA though lol
- wolvoleo 4mo agoWell technically it is distilled water so it will have a lot of pollution already removed
- erelong 4mo agoI'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/water-from-thin-air-how-to-harvest-fog-and-dew-in-post-collapse-environments https://www.campingsurvival.com/blogs/camping-survival-blogs...
- goda90 4mo agoCollecting 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).
- karim79 4mo agoAssuming 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.
- HardwareLust 4mo agoAnd a charging port for your phone.
- phyzix5761 4mo agoI 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 4mo agoYou'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 4mo agoRecipes themselves can't be copyrighted. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html 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-protected-by-copyright/ https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte... also goes into it.
- jstanley 4mo agoBut couldn't someone copy out the mere listing of ingredients anyway?
- throwaway81523 4mo agoI 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.
- throw678 4mo agoMIT came up with a device that harvests water from air few years back. What happened to that project?
- zombot 4mo agoFremen 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stillsuit
- bitwize 4mo agoSo the opposite of Marty's self-drying jacket in Back to the Future Part II?
- zelphirkalt 4mo agoOr an early version of the Fremen suits from Dune.
- sgt 4mo agoThis will sell well on Arrakis
- sbinnee 4mo agoIt’s far behind the Fremen made still suit. They will laugh at it.
- christkv 4mo agoWhere is my dune stillsuit ?
- bawana 4mo agoi guess this wouldnt work on arrakis
- cluckindan 4mo agoSure it would, if it can capture the humidity evaporated from skin and breath.
- warumdarum 4mo agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UMtqy9_NbYg&pp=0gcJCUACo7VqN5tD https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UMtqy9_NbYg&pp=0gcJCUACo7VqN5t...
- advisedwang 4mo agoI 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?
- jansan 4mo agoAnyone remember the self filling water bottle? Her you are: www.fontus.at Of course it did not work. And never hit the market
- jp57 4mo agoNot 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.
- steve_adams_86 4mo agoIt's very common to plumb into grey-water systems where they're installed, because you're right, it's perfectly useful water. Plumbing it into some kind of cistern like a rain catchment system would also make sense.
- dredmorbius 4mo agoSince A/C (or similarly, dehumidifiers) function by moving a large volume of air over a set of chilled coils, one consequence is that dust tends to accumulate on those coils, and be mixed in with the resultant condensate. 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.
- kruffalon 4mo agoHow much water was used to make 1 jacket? 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.
- TrnsltLife 4mo agoFirst someone declared the Butlerian Jihad. Now they've invented Fremen still suits. I want personal energy shields next.