Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin have built a jacket that pulls drinkable water directly from the air, offering a potential solution for hikers, soldiers, agricultural workers, and emergency responders who operate far from reliable water sources.
The jacket’s fabric is made from a biomass-derived hydrogel that draws in ambient moisture and channels it to detachable harvesting units. Those units sit inside a foldable collector piece, where sunlight heats them to release the water for collection. In lab testing, the jacket yielded between 400 and 900 ml of water per day, roughly 14 to 30 ounces, depending on humidity. Compared with conventional water-harvesting materials, the textile performed three to ten times better at scale, according to the researchers.
The team’s work, published in Science Advances, addresses a design gap that has limited atmospheric water harvesting to stationary devices like panels and sorbent beds. By engineering the transport pathway directly into the fiber, the fabric moves water from vapor in the air to liquid on the fiber surface and into the textile without the bulk of a standalone unit.
Alongside the jacket research, the same team published a second paper in Nature Water detailing a solar-powered harvesting device that set a new output record: 1.3 liters of clean water per day in both arid and semi-humid climates, equating to 4.3 liters per kilogram of moisture-capturing material per day. Field tests took place in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico and in Austin, Texas.
The researchers see both the fabric and the device as part of a wider push to bring atmospheric water harvesting to the regions that need it the most, including parts of North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Future applications could extend to backpacks, tents, and emergency shelters.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.