When a publication I was involved in got a university PR piece, they were in direct communication with us

University PR folk are sometimes quite scientifically illiterate. Their job is basically marketing. They need to turn an esoteric, jargon heavy, and heavily qualified paper into a hype piece that the money people can understand. Everything must be a ground-breaking, world-shaking, all-time first. They sometimes make dubious claims no matter how many times you tell them not to. Ultimately, they report to the university's money people and not to researchers.

If you want science, read journals. If you want to see who is likely to get more money, read university PR releases.

Amusingly, I have the same experience as you and GP. Thee university wants to hear what the researchers have to say, but subsequently they decide independently what they're writing, strict scientific honesty be damned.

Honesty pays no bills for professional liars.

Like diplomats, they're sent abroad to lie for their university, and the university president cries all the way to the bank for the sins of his hirelings.

I've observed the same. University science PR pieces are usually unreliable -- they are optimized toward generating buzz than scientific accuracy. They usually link to the actual science papers, but the prose is usually a stretch.

Even in this case -- "defying the laws of physics" is sensationalist narrative manufacturing.

The real claim is actually more moderate, and the research is not really close to commercial yet.

It's research-in-progress, but I think the promise is slightly different from dehumidifier bags (also in other parts of the world, Thirsty Hippos [1]) which are single use.

You're correct in that: (1) it doesn't break the law of physics; (2) to remove the droplets, you still need energy. But it sounds like if the droplets are moving to the surface, the energy needed to release the droplets could be far lower than most active dehumidification methods (e.g. Peltier junctions).

[1] Thirsty Hippos -- which are very effective in small spaces.

https://www.amazon.sg/Thirsty-Hippo-Dehumidifier-Moisture-Ab...

Basically a supercharged silica gel.

Probably a small piezo junction could be used to provide a solid-state vibrator for releasing water from a proportionately considerably larger area of the material, or at larger scales perhaps a technique similar to the ultrasonic sensor cleaners built into interchangeable-lens cameras.

Do you mean like an ultrasonic humidifier[1]?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ultrasonic-Humidifiers/s?k=Ultrasonic...

Sure, why not?

> > Ultrasonic humidifier

> Sure, why not?

https://dynomight.net/air/ estimates that using an ultrasonic humidifier for one night shortens your life by 50 minutes. Getting rid of any ultrasonic humidifiers is his top tip to extend your life cheaply.

Dedicated post on them: https://dynomight.net/humidifiers/

That was a great read. I didn’t know that blog and a quick glimpse at the about page made me bookmarked it. Thanks for sharing.

I've got some bad news if you live near a road.

I am aware that cars are ruining millions of people's health. That car drivers are privatising the convenience and externalising the harms of driving. That car drivers are a privileged, wealthy, class of people who can literally kill others and walk away without a jail sentence using the defence "I didn't see them":

https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/cyclist...

https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/driver-carele...

https://veronews.com/2022/08/06/no-jail-time-for-driver-of-c...

many other examples exist

Sure. And if any particulate emitted by an ultrasonic humidifier could be dangerous enough to shorten your life by ~10% with consistent use or 50 minutes per roughly 8-hour night's sleep as this timecuber of yours appears to claim, then I should think the tire and brake dust burden anywhere near an actively used road would be not just instantly but flagrantly fatal.

I'm aware of the hundred thousand words spent justifying the idea. I will consider reading them once I've been convinced to ignore the result of this trivial - and I do use the following phrase with careful consideration aforethought - sanity check. You'll more likely give the goalpost another kick, though, I suspect.

Explain where I have given any goalposts any kick at all?

From the articles:

> A good heuristic is that an increase of 33.3 PM2.5 μg/m³ costs around 1 disability-adjusted life year. Correia et al. (2013) estimated something close to this from different counties in the US, and more recent data from many different countries confirm this. The most polluted cities in the world have levels around 100 PM2.5 μg/m³.

> When inhaled during an 8-hr exposure time, and depending on mineral water quality, humidifier aerosols can deposit up to 100s of μg minerals in the human child respiratory tract and 3–4.5 times more μg of minerals in human adult respiratory tract. > (Yao et al., 2020)

The amount of particles people breathe in in a night of worst case ultrasonic humidifier use is 8x more than the particle level in the air of the most polluted cities in the world.

And of course every relationship is both bijective and linear from one data point over an infinite domain.

We could talk about this utter misrepresentation of https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23211349/ but why? You haven't read it. You won't. At most you will follow the examples you cite in prooftexting from it like a Southern Baptist inveighing against homosexuality. Kindly find someone else whose time so to waste.

I said, explain where I kicked any goalposts. You haven't, because I didn't. Ad-homs, against the author and against me, pre-deciding your conclusion, refusing to explain your objections, pretending "we could talk about it" while turning to insults to shut down any talking about it.

I get it, you're desperate to appear smart and superior, but arguing that lamely isn't doing it. Of course I'm not going to read your link, try and guess what misrepresentations you're coming up with, make some argument about them and their context in the wider post, only for you to ignore it and post some more nonsense in response. Or engage with you further.

The link I posted leads to a paper you cited. You've attributed a causal claim to the paper which it not only does not make, but even in its abstract very carefully avoids. If that isn't intentional falsity, then it is certainly a remarkable demonstration of intellectual negligence. In any case "desperate" is not how I would describe the simple fact that I did a better job checking your sources than you have, which by the look of the thing is to say that of the two of us I'm the only one who bothered actually investigating your argument at all.

You could not by now have done more to prove my point that you aren't bothering to actually know anything about what you present yourself able knowledgeably to discuss. Thanks for that. Feel free to embarrass yourself with further flagrant scientism if you like. Enjoy your day.

> a paper you cited.

> You've attributed a causal claim

> your sources

> your argument

> what you present yourself able knowledgeably to discuss.

No, no, no, nope and no. None of these accusations are correct. Feel free to embarrass yourself with lacking basic reading and quoting comprehension; I am not the author of the Dynomight article.

> I am not the author of the Dynomight article.

Who chose to bring it up? Who chose to insist on its baseless conclusions? Who then demonstrated the inability to defend those conclusions for their total lack of substance?

No, you don't get to represent the source you chose as accurate only until that fails to go your way, and then turn around and try to disclaim it. The embarrassment you now feel is amply earned.

This is what it feels like to have failed to evaluate your sources, argued strenuously in support of total nonsense, and thus made a complete and negligent fool of yourself. You should draw a lesson from that for next time you consider starting a conversation like this one.

You won't; you are too deeply in love with the idea of yourself as a clever person, and you won't dismiss the offense I gave to consider the substance of my remarks. This is a level of predictability I would not be comfortable with in myself. But that, too, is no problem of mine.

You've tried moving the goalposts again, had you noticed? If I let you get away with it, we wouldn't be talking about the factual inaccuracies, facial implausibilities, and ignorant misrepresentations of research, in the source you so uncritically chose, at all...

This isn't reddit. Please kindly take your anger, ad homonims, and bad-faith arguments back over there. I'm sorry you had a bad day but nobody in this thread caused it, so take a deep breath.

Sorry, did you have something substantive to add? Your comment history says not, as does that you carefully avoid substance here, preferring to - actually, that is not obvious and makes an interesting question. What is your purpose here?

Dehudifier bags (e.g. silica, CaCl) aren't single-use. Microwave, then reuse. Some even are color-changing so you know how much moisture they've absorbed.

Microwaving is adding energy, obviously. But the idea here is that the water is recoverable, not that the air is now drier.

Concur; the idea behind this class of devices is to take advantage of a daily humidity cycle. Whether it's CaCl (absorption) or Silica (adsorption), or the latest lab-designed adsorption surface.

This is a good time to note that I see one of these articles ~once every two years, for the past 10 years. I haven't observed one make it beyond the initial discovery phase.

This, and solutions for male pattern baldness.

By the 24th century, no one will care that you are bald.

I'm doubtful that President Camacho could've gained so much power without that fantastic coif

Unless you are Brian “Hairlacher” formerly of the Chicago Bears and shilling hair replacement on Chicago area billboards for years now.

Male pattern baldness is a solved problem, if caught early enough; people just don't usually bother, because the cleanest solution (a 5α-RI) can interfere with sexual function, the "proper" fix for that (low-dose topical application) is time-consuming (so people normally just kludge it with Viagra), and the medicines involved can (indirectly) cause breast growth with prolonged use (unlikely to be a problem with low-dose topical application, and can also be mitigated, although overshooting that mitigation can cause osteoporosis) and are "don't even touch this if you're pregnant" class (they can interfere with fœtal development).

If I have to relinquish my sexual function and grow breasts to reduce baldness, then baldness is not a solved problem.

out of curiosity, what else would you expect the side effect profile of something mediating the effects of a potent androgen on the body to look like?

it's not estrogen where you would expect breast growth (and can't count on any particular changes to sexual function anyway), it's inhibiting conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone which could have that effect, much like you could spontaneously develop gynecomastia without intentionally fiddling with your hormone balance. calling it unsolved sounds a lot like calling the very many conditions with medications that have more likely and worse side effects equally unsolved.

  > what else would you expect the side effect profile of something mediating the effects of a potent androgen on the body to look like?

I'm a consumer, not a medical professional. I have no expectations based upon detailed familiarity with the underlying biology. Or is the target market for these products medical professionals?

That's what the patient information sheet is for, and why everyone's supposed to have access to a trained medical professional they can freely consult for things like this.

> it's not estrogen where you would expect breast growth

Actually, it is. Reducing DHT levels causes the body to elevate both testosterone and œstrogen levels, via homeostasis. But yeah, it's not a direct effect, and if it's a problem you can twiddle further to make it go away. (You could even do that pre-emptively, though you normally get days and days of warning before breast development actually starts, so I'd advocate the "wait and see" approach.)

A condition is typically considered solved if there are drugs or procedures that cure it and either (a) have extremely rare side effects, or (b) have side-effects that are not as big a problem as the condition they are curing. If a pill existed that cured trh common cold but had a 1% chance of giving you cancer of the throat, people wouldn't proclaim "we've cured the common cold!".

Low-dose topical application doesn't have those problems. Heck, even "dose your entire body" doesn't always lead to sexual dysfunction. (And breast development is a rare side-effect that you'd notice before anything permanent happens, and is easily-addressed.) However, it is topical application of a medicine that can interfere with fœtal development.

Oh, almost forgot: any messing around with sex hormone levels puts you at risk of depression. That's big side effect #3 (though again, many people don't even notice it).

Started with topical Minoxidil at age 21. Have (almost) a full head of hair. Now I take it in pill form.

No breasts. And no other issues.

Minoxidil is a sledgehammer: it's got all sorts of other effects (e.g. reducing your blood pressure, beta something something). I wouldn't expect it to cause breast development, though, since it doesn't act on œstrogen receptors.

You seem knowledgeable. Where's a safe place to order the topical application from? I'm not in the US or Europe, our doctors aren't going to be bothered with (or knowledgeable about) something like treating baldness.

My Gmail username is the same as my HN username if you prefer to answer in private. Thanks

I don't have the savvy for stuff like actually acquiring medicines, unfortunately. You might be able to just buy it from your local pharmacy; but if not, you could check https://hrtcafe.net/ or – as a sibling commenter suggested – look into minoxidil (which works via a different mechanism). I wouldn't recommend minoxidil unless its other effects would be beneficial to you, since I'm leery of things that affect blood pressure and circulation – but I'm not actually trained in this stuff, so maybe it's considered safer.

Finasteride is less potent, but is normally recommended for cis men; not sure why. Theoretically, I'd expect dutasteride to be the better medication (and https://doi.org/10.2147/CIA.S192435 bears that out) if you can get hold of it.

I'd have thought finasteride and dutasteride weren't safe to take if there's a chance of you getting someone pregnant, but https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/finasteride/fertility-and-pregn... says it's fine, actually. https://doi.org/10.4103/0974-1208.86093 goes into more detail on that. (I'm not aware of any other impacts on fœtal development, only the intersex condition mentioned in that article – note that the backdoor pathway described in https://doi.org/10.1002/dvdy.23892 also requires the 5α-reductase enzyme –, but I'd still advise caution.)

Thank you. This is an extremely informative comment that gives me many avenues to pursue. Much appreciated.

Devices that automate this are readily available, I have one running now. "Desiccant dehumidifiers."

Those are usually just calcium chloride in a bag, it's very hygroscopic and fairly cheap... also makes a halfway decent de-icer. The issue I see with this thin-film method is that no mention is made of the rate of production at a given relative humidity for a given area of the film.

It's interesting, but without the details (and with a lot of PR speak) I'm skeptical as hell about this in practice.

If something breaks the laws of physics it simply means the laws of physics were incomplete, so we update them and now it no longer breaks them

However, if something claims to break the laws of physics, 99 times out of 100, it simply means that either a) the person making the claim missed something, or b) the person making the claim is lying.

Or c) the person making the claim has no interest in the truth, but strong interest in some other thing.

Which is the same as b)

Don't complicate

It is really as simple as that and even applies to soon what will seem like free energy. It is not free energy, it is just energy from a field we were previously ignoring and previously fighting against.

What is the source of this seemingly free energy that we've been ignoring and fighting against (I assume at different points in time)?

For example, Earth's magnetic field has been claimed as a source of "free" energy.

Yes this requires energy to extract the water, but if it's much less energy than dehumidifiers -say, one order of magnitude less- then it could make harvesting water from humid air economical.

Thanks for the explanation. My first thought reading the headlines was somebody thinks they discovered a perpetual motion machine.

What is the theoretical limit on the energy cost to remove water from air? A dew years back 3m had some super inexpensive way that invovled a reusable water andorber that released its water under only slightly decreased pressure and slightly increased temperature. The incoming air and the waste heat from the downstream ac unit provided all the warming with the pressure change being all that was necessary. It had two banks so one could dump water while the other absorbed. It made the whole system rund double digiymore efficient than just the ac alone. And that was neglecting that the felt temperature would be lower with the dessicated air.

> "remove water from air? A dew years back"

"dew" was a funny typo there :)

The loss of tactile keyboards on mobile devices is a tragedy.

Yes it is impossible to break the laws of physics. If they appear broken then it is only because our understanding was wrong. Similar, the laws cannot be “defied”. You can only do what the universe allows, nothing more.

Is there some sort of conservation of energy question in this form of water collection that establishes some minimum amount of energy that would be required to collect 1L of water from the air?

I'd assume if the amount of energy required to collect the water is low then we're looking at something interesting.

Yes, water vapor condensing to liquid water at humidity below 100% is an exothermic reaction, and the amount of energy released is (per Google) 2259kJ/kg. So any device that wants to condense 1kg of water has to dissipate at least 2259kJ of energy somewhere, assuming it is in any way temperature-dependent (if it can keep condensing water even if it becomes hotter, then this is somewhat evaded).

For context, that amount of heat is five times the amount needed to heat 1kg of liquid water from 0° to 100°C (without thawing or boiling it). So it's not in any way a trivial amount.

So the question is how much more efficient is it? I spend hundreds of dollars per month running dehumidifiers in my house so I am keen to know.

Me too! Because dust mites? Curious to share notes with you, I’m running 4 aeockys right now but they don’t seem to last long

The red flags in the uni PR are not so curious compared to the ones in the paper.

From figure 4 (& backed up by simulation fig 3E) it looks like stuff begins to happen only at 97% relative humidity & after a few minutes (at micrometer scale)

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu8349

Granted, it's almost easy enough to try at home: melt some poly gloves into "freeze dried" silica powder

Yeah, "harvesting" probably oversells it unless there's a passive or low-energy way to actually collect the water. Like, maybe coupling it with a wicking surface or capillary-driven transfer system could help, but that’s an open question.