A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air

https://news.utexas.edu/2026/06/11/this-jacket-pulls-drinking-water-from-thin-air/

by ilreb • 1 month ago

162 99 1 month ago

news.utexas.edu

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

sanex• 1 month ago

Seconded. I wonder which would taste better though.

Kurd• 1 month ago

Lisan al-Gaib!

ashton314• 1 month ago

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

g-b-r• 1 month ago

Just wear it in reverse ;)

A big step towards a stillsuit anyways ;)

3eb7988a1663• 1 month ago

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

gambiting2• 1 month ago

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

jerf• 1 month ago

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.

mncharity• 1 month ago

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.

SadErn• 1 month ago

Vaporware has never tasted so good or been so refreshing.

elgertam• 1 month ago

Vaporwear*

jojobas5• 1 month 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.

donkers2• 1 month 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.

jojobas5• 1 month ago

So a dehumidifier with extra steps.

advisedwang2• 1 month ago

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

PLenz• 1 month ago

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

EarlKing2• 1 month ago

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

AnimalMuppet• 1 month ago

Out of here to where?

Loughla• 1 month ago

Honestly, bring on Leto II. Fuck it.

kreelman• 1 month 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..

zombot2• 1 month ago

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

keithnz2• 1 month 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• 1 month 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.

keithnz2• 1 month ago

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

b3ing• 1 month ago

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

the__alchemist2• 1 month 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

donkers2• 1 month 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.

tentacleuno• 1 month ago

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

8note• 1 month 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

jojobas5• 1 month ago

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

jojobas5• 1 month 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• 1 month 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.

throwaway815232• 1 month 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

brodo• 1 month ago

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

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

JeremyNT• 1 month ago

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

FuriouslyAdrift• 1 month ago

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

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

1970-01-01• 1 month ago

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.

NopIdoN• 1 month ago

works in the rain

grugagag• 1 month ago

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

aspicytaco4me• 1 month ago

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

Ekaros• 1 month 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.

trick-or-treat2• 1 month ago

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

regularfry• 1 month 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.

johnnyApplePRNG• 1 month ago

Incredible innovation.

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

wolvoleo• 1 month ago

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

erelong• 1 month 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 month 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).

karim792• 1 month 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.

HardwareLust• 1 month ago

And a charging port for your phone.

phyzix5761• 1 month 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.

karim792• 1 month 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 month 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.

jmyeet• 1 month 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.

fuzzfactor2• 1 month ago

This is where all the printer paper goes . . .

adolfojp• 1 month ago

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.

fuzzfactor2• 1 month ago

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

throw678• 1 month ago

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

bigiain• 1 month 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?

zombot2• 1 month 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

bitwize• 1 month ago

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

zelphirkalt• 1 month ago

Or an early version of the Fremen suits from Dune.

sgt• 1 month ago

This will sell well on Arrakis

sbinnee• 1 month ago

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

christkv• 1 month ago

Where is my dune stillsuit ?

bawana• 1 month ago

i guess this wouldnt work on arrakis

cluckindan• 1 month ago

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

warumdarum• 1 month ago

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

advisedwang2• 1 month ago

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?

jansan• 1 month ago

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

www.fontus.at

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

jp57• 1 month ago

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.

steve_adams_86• 1 month ago

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.

dredmorbius2• 1 month ago

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.

kruffalon• 1 month ago

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.

TrnsltLife• 1 month ago

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

A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air

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