You can’t pluck water out of thin air!…..Can you?
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
The atmosphere holds a lot of water! The tricky part? Harvesting it. Condensing vapor by heating and cooling air eats up a ton of energy. So now what?
Enter Ikra Shuvo and team at MIT!
First, they fabricated hydrogels that can pull moisture from air. Then they built a device that condenses the moisture into water with ultrasonic vibration.
Result? Using a cycle of gel absorption and vibration, roughly three liters of water can be extracted per day. AND it cuts energy use by forty-five fold.
Turns out, it’s not so hard to make it rain. For MIT.
References: Shuvo, I. I., Díaz-Marín, C. D., Christen, M., Lherbette, M., Liem, C., & Boriskina, S. V. (2025). High-efficiency atmospheric water harvesting enabled by ultrasonic extraction. Nature Communications, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-65586-2