this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/59925291

The system can function in air with 20% humidity or less. But these 1,000 liter a day machines are not small, at around shipping container size.

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[–] 69420@lemmy.world 228 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Finally, I can achieve my dreams of becoming a moisture farmer.

[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 82 points 1 month ago (7 children)

Hope you enjoy a whiny nephew

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 46 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I swear to god if that kid brings up the academy one more time, just kill me

[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 19 points 1 month ago (2 children)

But crying about not getting to go to Tashii station is okay?

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 25 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Shut the FUCK up we have a shed literally full of power converters, your friends are absolute trash anyway and come on what kind of name even is "Biggs Darklighter" it sounds like his parents were from a Flash Gordon ripoff

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[–] DaddleDew@lemmy.world 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Peaceful living as a smoldering skeleton

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[–] Eccowave@feddit.org 84 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

We need to harness Desert Power!

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[–] HowAbt2day@futurology.today 59 points 1 month ago (5 children)

That water was in its way to somewhere, though. What is that other area gonna look like now that this device intercepts the water?

[–] SweatyFireBalls@lemmy.world 60 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sounds like that other area needs to pull up on those bootstraps and make a water machine for its needs then.

This comment is brought to you by the sigma water machine, buy yours today and lock your grindset on hydration!

(Hopefully obvious but /s)

[–] HowAbt2day@futurology.today 8 points 1 month ago

Are you on the Temu or the Amazon so that I can get some good boot straps and choke myself to ejaculation?

[–] Hoimo@ani.social 20 points 1 month ago

Eventually all that dry air will end up above the ocean and absorb more water to balance the system. I don't think it's really an issue, we weren't getting rain clouds from the Sahara anyway.

[–] Steve@startrek.website 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Dooooom

Someone is going to drink it then sweat it back into the air. I doubt its going to get bottled and shipped somewhere else.

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[–] chunes@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

same could be said about every shower you take and every toilet you flush

[–] D_C@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

🎶And every bond you break, every step you take
I'll be watching you!!🎵

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[–] Zwiebel@feddit.org 44 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Atoco harnesses the power of AI to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and real-world implementation, transforming innovative research into scalable solutions. By integrating machine learning and AI with reticular chemistry, we dramatically reduce the time needed to develop, optimize and scale our novel nano-engineered reticular materials for carbon capture and atmospheric water harvesting.

Bruh.

[–] thatsTheCatch@lemmy.nz 43 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is likely not the Generative AI, LLM-slop type of AI you're thinking of.

I hate generative AI. But other forms of AI and machine learning have been used for much longer and haven't facilitated the building of ecologically harmful datacenters.

For example, AlphaFold, which is an AI program that can predict how proteins fold and is an incredibly useful tool.

I expect that the use of AI here would be similar: something trained for a specific purpose, not just generic generative AI tech like ChatGPT

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[–] ghost@slrpnk.net 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Reading that felt like my brain was trying to chew glue

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[–] dil@piefed.zip 8 points 1 month ago

I was researching ai before llms for a gen ed class, this isn't the sensationalized type of ai, ai in medicine and sht is pretty cool. Hospitality ai is getting too good too fast tho. Robot hotels and restaurants would not be suprising.

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/new-ai-tool-pinpoints-genes-drug-combos-restore-health-diseased-cells

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00240-5

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[–] MolochHorridus@lemmy.ml 43 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

Yet again, nobody seems to be giving a thought what this means to organisms that are living in the desert. This water is necessary for life and we’re taking it.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 60 points 1 month ago (1 children)

As someone who has thought about it, could you provide the data that you used to come to the conclusion that the amount of water being extracted from the air has any appreciable effect on local life?

From my thinking...

Death Valley covers 7800km^2.. Atmospheric moisture is typically contained in the first 10km of air. So there is somewhere around 2.5 quadrillion cubic feet of air containing 114 billion gallons of water.

The average Atmospheric Water Vapour Residence Time is around 8 days The median is 5 days and Death Valley's topography is a valley which would trap more moisture, but we'll use the average instead.

This represents a moisture turnover rate of about 625,000 Liters/second (or 1.45x10^10 gallons/day).

So, one of these devices would consume .000185% of the moisture that enters Death Valley every day.

[–] besmtt@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] FiskFisk33@startrek.website 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

ground water is a completely different beast. This device harvests moisture from the air.

[–] KaChilde@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You are assuming that there will only be one device used by a careful and considerate individual.

I can think of many companies that would 100000% set up a moisture farming complex if it was financially feasible. Who gives a fuck about the environment? It’s basically free water from nothing, right?

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[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

If you plan on drinking the water, or cooking with the water, it's going right back into the air after you pee or sweat and the water evaporates. Literally no damage done.

You cannot make the water actually disappear unless you use it in some kind of chemical reaction, and even then it may end up returning to water eventually.

[–] KaChilde@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I would think that ripping 1000L of water out of an environment in a day is going to have more immediate impacts than you eventually pissing on a cactus is going to fix…

Sure, the water isn’t “destroyed”, but it is being removed from an ecosystem that has evolved to use every last bit of water it can find to survive. It may not be immediately obvious, but it sounds just as damaging as removing 1000L of water a day from a lake and thinking the ecosystem will be fine because you’re going to sweat next to the dry lakebed.

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[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 35 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This has been debunked before. To get 1000liter of water out of the air, the air needs to hold that much water.

[–] Slashme@lemmy.world 36 points 1 month ago (2 children)

This is a bit more serious than the old, frequently-debunked "dehumidifier in the desert" stuff, because it doesn't depend on cooling the air to get the water out, but using a molecular sponge. If you pump enough air over that, you'll eventually fill it up, and you can drive the water out by heating it up.

The guy behind this is a serious organic chemist, and his Nobel prize was actually for pioneering and developing these molecules, so it's not a case of "Nobel prize winner does daft stuff about a subject he's not an expert in", either.

I'm still reserving judgement on whether this will be economically sensible, but I'm not dismissing it immediately, either.

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[–] Hi_ImSomeone@lemmy.world 34 points 1 month ago (22 children)

I used to work for a company making a similar device, the chemistry behind the technology is actually a well researched topic, and there are many kinds of various chemistries that can achieve a similar effect. Silica gel packets are the most common, a cheap solution that extracts moisture from the air, but is non-reusable.

These MOF compounds are useful because they have a fundamentally different method of collecting the water molecules. The framework traps the molecules inside, which can be later released with heat. Thermal solar power is free, but does require careful management of the rest of the device such that the material can get hot enough (usually around 100c), which also providing another surface to condense the vapour. I spent alot of time designing and testing such panels. They do work! I can post pictures of fishtanks of water later.

There truly couldn't be much of a downside to these technologies. The real alternative is desalination, which produces hyper concentrated salt pools, or well water extraction, which is also bad...

The reason these technologies is usually due to the cost effectiveness to produce the material, and to build the enclosure around the material. The panels have to scale very large to get any reasonable about of solar power, plus the condensing and collecting mechanisms also add weight and cost. Water is not an expensive product, so at the end of the day, the economics don't always work out favourably.

Happy to answer any questions about the technology.

[–] Hi_ImSomeone@lemmy.world 12 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Here's a picture of one of our tests generating water from air! We got 21kg from a large-ish panel.

I can't show much else but I can guarantee we did harvest the water from the air.

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[–] homes@piefed.world 28 points 1 month ago (3 children)
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[–] cout970@programming.dev 24 points 1 month ago

Oh no, the same scam again, when will people realize that putting dehumidifiers in the desert, where there is little to none humidity in the air does not produce significant quantities of water.

You can claim that your solution produces thousands of liters of water, but in practice its obvious that you cannot extract more water than what's already im the air, once you extract it, there is nothing left, it may work at first, but is not going to work continuously forever.

This is another example of a promised technology scam, pay me for the development and once it doesn't work, disappear with the money. People keep falling for it for some reason.

[–] SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world 24 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well, unless he sells the patent to Nestle, it's COMMUNISM. Water is private property. /s

[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

It's a dehumidifier. There's nothing to patent that hasn't already been patented.

[–] sveltecider@lemmy.world 23 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I’m always extremely skeptical of stuff like this

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[–] TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 1 month ago (2 children)

There have been so many of these devices promoted in Kickstarter, dragons den, etc.

I'm highly sceptical, as so far scientists have told me there simply isn't that much moist in the desert air to get even one liter of clean water per day. You simply cannot create water out of nothing.

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[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 19 points 1 month ago (9 children)

So... Another dehumidifier... We've been over this before.

Many times.

Many many times.

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[–] zephiriz@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 month ago

How many times do we have to fall for this garbage. Well I guess if your doing it to scam dumb rich people be my guest, but this shit is dumb.

https://youtu.be/OfmQcY_sEt0

[–] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 month ago (5 children)

shipping container size

That’s far smaller than I expected. I also don’t imagine it will be cheap. If they manage to make it less than $100,000 then I’ll be baffled. Less than $500,000 and I’ll be excited for the possibilities in my lifetime.

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[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 13 points 1 month ago

Yaghi’s mechanism can do this without a power source. It uses the wind and air for water input, then the sun to drive condensation and evaporative action.

Really interesting. This could totally transform many places on Earth.

[–] kalkulat@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

Here's a back-up, science paper on MOF from Nature with measured numbers. 8 liters per KG per day isn't 1000 gallons until you get to 2 tons ... but it's about 200 liters per out of 25 KG ... easily carried.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58405-9

"The effects of temperature, relative humidity, and powder bed thickness on the adsorption-desorption process are explored for achieving optimal operational parameters. We found that Zr-MOF-808 can produce up to 8.66 LH2O kg−1MOF day−1, an extraordinary finding that outperforms any previously reported values for MOF-based systems.... "

[–] lumettaria@sopuli.xyz 10 points 4 weeks ago

Don't let Sam Altman know about this, his data centers about to have some upgrades /s

[–] vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 month ago

If people keep reinventing the fucking dehumidifier I'm going to start beating these dipshits bloody. Or maybe I should just collect the old beater ones I see at estate and yard sales to make YouTube videos making fun of them. Regardless this is barely worth praise for an amateur engineering project let alone a nobel prize.

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