Highly read on pubs.acs.org in September

One square metre of high-tech mesh could capture 12 litres of potable water a day from morning fog.

Fog-harvesters are used in countries such as Chile to collect drinking water. Tiny fog droplets in humid air blow through mesh filaments, where they coalesce into larger drops that roll into a collecting trough.

To boost the amount of water captured, Robert Cohen and Gareth McKinley at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and their colleagues systematically modelled and tested surface chemistries, fibre thicknesses and geometrical configurations of woven mesh. They produced a mesh of thin steel strands coated with a fluorinated polymer. In laboratory tests simulating Chilean mountain fog, the mesh collected water at rates fivefold higher than conventional fog-catching meshes and came close to the theoretical limit calculated by the researchers.

Langmuir http://doi.org/n7n (2013)