As a similar comment note, it's like a high tech Dehumidifier bag. https://www.amazon.com/Wisesorb-Moisture-Eliminator-Fragranc... The bags have Calcium Chloride and absorb water from unsaturated air and make small drops of water. It's obvious that they get depleted, and to use them again you must buy a new one or boil all the water to get the crystals again.

In this new material, the droplets are attached to the material. To remove them you must use energy. They don't just drop to a bucket bellow the device magically. You can't use it to "harvest" water without energy. You can sweep the droplets with a paper towel, but now to remove the water from the paper towel you need energy.

> With a material that could potentially defy the laws of physics in their hands

This does not break the laws of physics. It would be nice that the PR department of the universities get a short course explaining that if they believe the laws of physics are broken, then they must double check with the authors and then triple check with another independent experts. Tech journalist should take the same course.

Note that the bad sentence and the misleading title is from the university https://blog.seas.upenn.edu/penn-engineers-discover-a-new-cl...

"All measurements were performed at 20° ± 0.2°C maintained by an air circulation system unless otherwise noted. The temperature of the films was controlled using a heating/cooling unit (THMS350V, Linkam Scientific Instruments, Salfords, UK) when necessary."

So the latent heat is conducted away by the cooling apparatus, it's just not explicitly stated, to sound more sensational.

Their mumbo-jumbo about water being "squeezed out" onto the surface by the hydrophobic component is totally bogus as well. The condensation will just stop earlier, without overflowing. Water condensing in concave pores and being squeezed into convex droplets requires hydrostatic pressure to be positive and negative at the same time.

The possibilities I see are: 1) contaminated surfaces 2) miscalibrated relative humidity or 3) they've neglected to mention a cooling plate that keeps the material below ambient.

1. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu8349

Also, they do a really good job of making it sound like it violates thermodynamics. Since it doesn't, and dehumidifiers already do a good job of getting water out of air for the energy price you have to pay, there has to be some other selling point. Right? But I'm not sure I see it.

I'm fairly certain they've created some form of a Brownian Ratchet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet

People love to claim there's no external energy source, but then when you look closely, you'll find a hot-cold differential, and then you need external energy to maintain that differential. I'd put a large sum of money that either the material is colder than the ambient environment or the incoming moisture is warmer than the ambient environment. It might even be a differential within their material, and the lab lights are warming one side! There's a lot of passive devices that rely on the hot-cold cycle of day and night, that still counts as energy input from the sun.

The article even mentions they tried to rule out a thermal gradient by increasing the thickness of the material, I'm not sure I understand why that would rule it out... the gradient would still exist.

I hate this, because if they aren't intentionally supplying energy, it's probably really efficient (assuming they aren't taking samples out of the freezer or something) so it's still a big deal and important but apparently we have to claim something is a perpetual motion machine to get attention among the public.

What if you could eventually program the pore size? This would mean you could change the inflow/outflow balance of the reservoirs on-demand. Imagine smart clothing. Hot out -> increase pore size so the material dumps water, cold out -> pore size shrinks so the water is less likely to evaporate.

I am peeved by the "violates physics" verbiage in the article though.

Always testing the AI's I thought this might be a fun one to watch how they think through it since it is about technology that they would not have been trained on. Grok thought through the process more thoroughly than I (B.S.ChemE) would've .

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_e80e8100-3682-4157-879e-c5ca...

It produces about 3 gallons of water a night.

34.997387, -116.380048

See the big tube sticking up? There's a miner's hotel built there.

There's no free lunch, but removing water from a fabric matrix is a well understood process. Thats what washerwomen have done for millenia.

Put one of these next to every tree. Or lines of them along rows of crops.

Run one in homes to make your ac more efficient and manage humidity.

Collect water on mountains or tall buildings and make hydro power?

Keep your pool topped off.

Basically Let salt water saturate the air in a closed system and use these to collect the water.

The best things may come by accident, which is where it sometimes just starts to get good.

But what are the difference in odds for someone who is constantly experimenting versus someone who experiments not at all?

Regardless of what you really set out to accomplish to begin with.

And which has the momentum to continue experimenting, even in the case of a major pivot?

Looks like they really have hit the sweet spot and it's a bit like creating molecular sieves which are tuned to release the collected moisture without excess energy.

Could also be harvesting a little ambient energy and working to "zone refine" the atmospheric fluid.