Harvesting the Clouds: Making Water Out of Fog

11 December 2014

 - Generally, when scientists look to nature for inspiration, they look to environments that mimic what they’re trying to build. In the case of collecting water from air, that meant desert plants and animals — seeing what special structures they might have to harvest fog water. So it was surprising when a fog-collecting discovery came from a far wetter source: the beaks of shorebirds. And it could inspire a pretty radical redesign of fog collection devices.

The new beak-inspired fog collector consists of two plates that come together and then move apart, collecting and transporting deposited water droplets.