A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air

ilreb 85 points 51 comments June 11, 2026
news.utexas.edu · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (15 comments)

loloquwowndueo

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

SadErn

Vaporware has never tasted so good or been so refreshing.

jojobas

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

PLenz

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

keithnz

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.

b3ing

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

the__alchemist

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

NopIdoN

works in the rain

grugagag

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

johnnyApplePRNG

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

erelong

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...

karim79

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.

phyzix5761

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.

throw678

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

bigiain

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?

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