Almost 900 million people in the world live without access to safe drinking water—the kind of water that is safe enough to flow straight from the tap into your mouth (with maybe a Brita filter in between). For these people, walking hours each day to faraway and potentially contaminated streams and wells is a way of life, and not one that is particularly conducive to getting much done. That’s the developing world water story you’ve heard 1,000 times before. But now we may not need wells to solve that problem. Because there is, in fact, clean water in the air all around you—if you know how to catch it.
Researchers at MIT are working on a fog-harvesting device (click through for picture) inspired by the Namib Beetle, an African species that gathers water droplets from the morning fog on its back and lets the moisture roll into its mouth. The geeks at MIT (sadly) aren’t proposing that humans run around wearing beetle-like shells on their backs. Instead, a human-scale fog-harvesting device is made up of a mesh panel that collects water particles into a receptacle. Continued…
