A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air

The claim on this one is that the textile is supposed to be substantially better than extant desiccants:

> 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).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzClLWL-Eys

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.

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

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 isn't passive. The paper states it needs to be heated to 60C and then you extract the water. They use a "DC power source" so you're still putting a battery into the jacket.

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.

    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."

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.

Since 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.

It'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.

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.

It’s far behind the Fremen made still suit. They will laugh at it.

I don't know about the rest of you, but if somebody spots Shai-hulud out in the Sahara I'm outta here.

   Oh I'm a leavin' on a Shai-hulud
   Don't know when I'll be back again..

After the datacenters ruin all the water, we will need those stillsuits.

Well technically it is distilled water so it will have a lot of pollution already removed

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).

Or an early version of the Fremen suits from Dune.

Sure it would, if it can capture the humidity evaporated from skin and breath.

And a charging port for your phone.

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!

Seconded. I wonder which would taste better though.

Just wear it in reverse ;)

A big step towards a stillsuit anyways ;)

Would you want it? I thought you were supposed to urinate and defecate in the suit so as to maximally retain moisture.

Vaporwear*

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.