Free Republic

You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, but wringing water from the desert sky is now possible, thanks to a new spongelike device that uses sunlight to suck water vapor from air, even in low humidity. The device can produce nearly 3 liters of water per day, and researchers say future versions will be even better. That means homes in the driest parts of the world could soon have a solar-powered appliance capable of delivering all the water they need, offering relief to billions of people. To find an all-purpose solution, researchers led by Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the...

When kids learn about the planet’s water cycle, they’re taught a simple concept: our atmosphere is filled with water vapor that has evaporated from the bodies of liquid water we see around us. When the vapor’s temperature gets low enough, it gets turned back into water. The presence of that vapor becomes especially apparent in the summer, when droplets collect on glasses of ice water and air conditioning units drip onto unsuspecting passersby. An Israeli company called Water-Gen does not think of that condensation as a byproduct; instead, it has built machines specifically designed to create and harvest as much...

You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, but wringing water from the desert sky is now possible, thanks to a new spongelike device that uses sunlight to suck water vapor from air, even in low humidity. The device can produce nearly 3 liters of water per day, and researchers say future versions will be even better. That means homes in the driest parts of the world could soon have a solar-powered appliance capable of delivering all the water they need, offering relief to billions of people.   There are an estimated 13 trillion liters of water floating in the atmosphere...