Development - An Opportunity
Alphabet Designed a Low-cost Device to Make Drinking Water from Air. Now it’s Open-sourced By Adele Peters
LAST YEAR, ON THE ROOF of a parking lot at Google’s headquarters, engineers from X— Alphabet’s “moonshot factory”—set up a panel to begin its first tests. The design, called an atmospheric water harvester, pulls in outside air, then uses fans and heat from sunlight to create condensation, producing clean drinking water drip by drip. In a new paper published today (October 27th) in Nature, the team calculates how much this type of device could potentially help give more people access to water that’s safe to drink. G l o b a l l y, as many as one in three p e o p l e still drink u n s a f e water that can spread diseases. The X team used WHO/ UNICEF datasets t h a t mapped out exactly w h e r e t h e s e people live and, for the first time, c ompared
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those locations with the ideal climate conditions for using an atmospheric water harvester. Then it compared those locations with the ideal climate conditions for using an atmospheric water harvester. When the air is too dry, for example, the devices don’t work well, but the study found that 1 billion people who currently don’t have safe drinking water live in places where the device would function well. Because larger water infrastructure projects, like desalination plants, take many years to plan and
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