A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air

6/12/2026 at 1:33:38 AM

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

by the__alchemist

6/12/2026 at 8:09:24 PM

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

by JeremyNT

6/12/2026 at 8:24:04 PM

Damn... I was hoping we'd finally get Stillsuits.

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Stillsuit

by FuriouslyAdrift

6/12/2026 at 9:59:30 AM

Yea, usually the next step is starting a Kickstarter campaign and then rug-pulling.

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

by brodo

6/12/2026 at 1:47:58 AM

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.

by donkers

6/12/2026 at 3:57:10 AM

> 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

by 8note

6/12/2026 at 4:30:00 AM

A shot is ~ 35 ml to 50 ml, so one to three shots a day. :p

by toast0

6/12/2026 at 12:30:40 PM

If a human needs about 1L per day on a minimal survival scenario, we're talking 20+ jackets right?

by joseda-hg

6/12/2026 at 2:48:32 PM

Just get your friends to wear them too.

by wussboy

6/12/2026 at 3:33:13 PM

who gets to drink today?

by red-iron-pine

6/12/2026 at 5:36:06 PM

It's the new drinking game, obvs.

by dredmorbius

6/12/2026 at 6:05:45 AM

1.5oz in the US, which is about 44mL

by aidenn0

6/12/2026 at 6:59:05 AM

That's about the average of 35mL and 50mL. ;)

by ssl-3

6/12/2026 at 4:13:33 AM

Both devices handwave on how the cooling required to condense the water occurs.

by jojobas

6/12/2026 at 2:16:51 PM

I believe this uses absorption; not cooling [condensation].

by the__alchemist

6/12/2026 at 7:50:55 PM

Abortion release the same amount of heat than condensation. So you can cool the material before and get condensation or absorb the water and cool the material later.

Sweating keeps you cool, absorbing the sweat will cancel the cooling effect and you will overheat and may die.

by gus_massa

6/12/2026 at 2:06:40 AM

Many thanks for your link to the article, it was a very interesting read; fascinating to learn how glycerol interacts with lithium salts...

by tentacleuno

6/12/2026 at 3:54:57 AM

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

by sciencejerk

6/12/2026 at 6:26:32 AM

The salt is there to be hygroscopic, they don't want the salt out. The structure is there to keep the salt in.

by murderfs

6/12/2026 at 2:30:57 AM

[dead]

by aaron695

6/12/2026 at 3:55:30 AM

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

by jojobas

6/12/2026 at 9:42:39 AM

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.

by dsego

6/12/2026 at 4:53:37 AM

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

by throwaway81523

6/12/2026 at 10:06:00 PM

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.

by 1970-01-01

6/12/2026 at 3:06:53 AM

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.

by phyzix5761

6/12/2026 at 3:12:20 AM

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.

by karim79

6/12/2026 at 4:32:28 AM

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.

by shagie

6/12/2026 at 7:40:51 AM

Cooks and mathematicians are not allowed to make money. For everybody else we have patents.

by amelius

6/12/2026 at 4:45:33 AM

But couldn't someone copy out the mere listing of ingredients anyway?

by jstanley

6/12/2026 at 4:51:30 AM

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.

by throwaway81523

6/12/2026 at 8:26:00 AM

> intereting

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

by thih9

6/12/2026 at 5:37:38 AM

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.

by vasco

6/12/2026 at 5:54:56 AM

You don't know how many side projects they have. I had a recipe website at one time along with 50 other things.

by trick-or-treat

6/12/2026 at 5:27:57 AM

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.

by jmyeet

6/12/2026 at 11:31:36 AM

This is good, however that first sentence needs to be removed, it's too factual and orients the reader too much.

by dsjoerg

6/12/2026 at 4:31:51 PM

This is where all the printer paper goes . . .

by fuzzfactor

6/12/2026 at 3:06:11 PM

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.

by adolfojp

6/12/2026 at 4:29:48 PM

You've got to figure it's not like ordinary plastic, and probably not just anybody's grandmother either :)

by fuzzfactor

6/12/2026 at 6:16:14 PM

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.

by jp57

6/13/2026 at 2:46:01 AM

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.

by dredmorbius

6/12/2026 at 7:23:15 PM

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.

by steve_adams_86

6/12/2026 at 2:29:43 AM

This reminds me of Dune. Does this really work tho?

by grugagag

6/12/2026 at 4:24:06 AM

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.

by Ekaros

6/12/2026 at 5:56:52 AM

When you kill a man do you get to take his water?

by trick-or-treat

6/12/2026 at 3:54:41 AM

I honestly can’t believe the article didn’t mention dune.

by aspicytaco4me

6/12/2026 at 9:20:23 AM

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.

by regularfry

6/12/2026 at 9:44:03 AM

This will sell well on Arrakis

by sgt

6/12/2026 at 12:24:55 PM

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

by sbinnee

6/12/2026 at 5:37:13 AM

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?

by bigiain

6/12/2026 at 5:27:12 PM

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?

by advisedwang

6/12/2026 at 12:48:52 AM

Makes sense since we're speedrunning the other parts of the Butlerian jihad

by PLenz

6/12/2026 at 1:18:25 AM

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

by EarlKing

6/12/2026 at 2:17:28 AM

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..

by kreelman

6/12/2026 at 1:22:51 AM

Out of here to where?

by AnimalMuppet

6/12/2026 at 1:49:15 AM

Outside of the environment?

by whynotmaybe

6/12/2026 at 8:33:12 AM

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

by gambiting

6/12/2026 at 4:29:23 AM

The deep desert. As far from the pyons as the sands go.

by EarlKing

6/12/2026 at 2:03:26 AM

Honestly, bring on Leto II. Fuck it.

by Loughla

6/12/2026 at 8:20:21 AM

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.

by kakacik

6/12/2026 at 8:27:08 AM

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

by zombot

6/12/2026 at 8:20:33 AM

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

by zombot

6/12/2026 at 2:58:22 PM

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UMtqy9_NbYg&pp=0gcJCUACo7VqN5t...

by warumdarum

6/12/2026 at 2:38:16 AM

Incredible innovation.

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

by johnnyApplePRNG

6/12/2026 at 6:44:56 PM

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

by wolvoleo

6/12/2026 at 9:00:53 PM

First someone declared the Butlerian Jihad. Now they've invented Fremen still suits. I want personal energy shields next.

by TrnsltLife

6/12/2026 at 1:03:53 AM

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.

by keithnz

6/12/2026 at 1:35:45 AM

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.

by brewdad

6/12/2026 at 2:18:17 AM

from what I can tell, you dont have to wear it?

by keithnz

6/12/2026 at 8:30:26 AM

So the opposite of Marty's self-drying jacket in Back to the Future Part II?

by bitwize

6/12/2026 at 8:51:00 AM

Or an early version of the Fremen suits from Dune.

by zelphirkalt

6/12/2026 at 3:18:22 AM

MIT came up with a device that harvests water from air few years back. What happened to that project?

by throw678

6/12/2026 at 2:49:26 AM

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...

by erelong

6/12/2026 at 4:10:09 AM

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).

by goda90

6/12/2026 at 1:25:08 AM

I wonder if it has microplastics, but probably depends what kind of fabric was used

by b3ing

6/12/2026 at 10:25:29 AM

Where is my dune stillsuit ?

by christkv

6/12/2026 at 11:32:49 AM

i guess this wouldnt work on arrakis

by bawana

6/12/2026 at 11:45:18 AM

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

by cluckindan

6/12/2026 at 1:42:25 AM

works in the rain

by NopIdoN

6/12/2026 at 5:42:55 PM

Anyone remember the self filling water bottle? Her you are:

www.fontus.at

Of course it did not work. And never hit the market

by jansan

6/12/2026 at 2:59:28 AM

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.

by karim79

6/12/2026 at 12:53:24 PM

And a charging port for your phone.

by HardwareLust

6/12/2026 at 12:14:59 AM

My first thought was “yay a stillsuit” - but this grabs moisture from the air, not the wearer’s body. So no. No stillsuit yet.

by loloquwowndueo

6/12/2026 at 5:22:31 PM

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.

by jerf

6/12/2026 at 11:00:36 PM

That'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.

by mncharity

6/12/2026 at 12:23:45 AM

Lisan al-Gaib!

by Kurd

6/12/2026 at 3:02:36 AM

But are you wearing it slip-shod, like the natives do?

by ashton314

6/12/2026 at 12:22:44 AM

Seconded. I wonder which would taste better though.

by sanex

6/12/2026 at 12:24:03 AM

Just wear it in reverse ;)

A big step towards a stillsuit anyways ;)

by g-b-r

6/12/2026 at 12:34:22 AM

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

by 3eb7988a1663

6/12/2026 at 8:34:51 AM

I mean, astronauts already do that - their urine and feaces are processed, water extracted and purified and used for drinking again.

by gambiting

6/12/2026 at 12:22:19 AM

Vaporware has never tasted so good or been so refreshing.

by SadErn

6/12/2026 at 1:52:47 AM

Vaporwear*

by elgertam

6/12/2026 at 12:20:31 AM

[dead]

by ArchieScrivener

6/12/2026 at 1:29:09 AM

[dead]

by niggischiggi

6/12/2026 at 12:32:55 AM

This sort of thing can't work as it would break basic laws of thermodynamics. Best case it's a dehumidifier with extra steps.

by jojobas

6/12/2026 at 12:51:35 AM

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.

by donkers

6/12/2026 at 5:31:10 PM

The thermodynamic issue is not that there's not enough energy, it's that the heat output has nowhere to go.

by advisedwang

6/12/2026 at 1:00:08 AM

So a dehumidifier with extra steps.

by jojobas

6/12/2026 at 1:06:08 AM

"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.

by Supermancho

6/12/2026 at 6:15:15 AM

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?

by vintermann

6/12/2026 at 2:02:32 AM

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

by jojobas

6/12/2026 at 8:25:06 PM

How 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.

by kruffalon