You think Brita is a high-tech way of getting clean water? Faucet filters have got nothing on a new kind of plastic developed by researchers at MIT that both attracts and repels water droplets — at the same time. As impossible as that sounds, here's how it works: parts of the surface repel water (hydrophobic) while others attract it (hydrophilic). In the pictures, you can see droplets in the hydrophobic regions forming nearly perfect spheres, while they become flattened in the hydrophilic ones. One possible application is a water accumulator: moisture in the air would build up on the hydrophilic regions until it spills over onto a hydrophobic area, where it would quickly form a round water droplet and roll off into a channel. Coating the hydrophilic parts with an antibacterial agent would make the water safe to drink. The new water-harvesting plastic could be a godsend to dry-climate communities with limited access to fresh water. We suspect it would be pretty complicated to clean, though.
Technology Review, via Neatorama
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