The Chilean coastal fog, known as camanchaca, moves across the Atacama Desert to hover over the inland mountains (Bosque de Fray Jorge National Park pictured). The thick fog does not drop rain, but researchers are using a fine netting of stainless-steel filaments to capture droplets of water from the thick fog, which is then harvested for potable and irrigation use. There is also a company devising a water bottle to basically to the same thing.

The idea for collecting water from Chilean coastal fog was inspired by flora and fauna of the region that does just that: the thin pine needles of Casuarina equisetfolia, and the Namib beetle, which has a bumpy back and a trough-like grooves on its wing scales.

The saying goes, "Where there's a will, there's a way," but it also holds that "Where there's a need, there's a way."

The need in the Atacama Desert plateau on the coast of Chile is, not surprisingly, fresh water. This purported "oldest desert on Earth" is one of the driest spots on the planet, receiving only about a half-inch (.59) of annual precipitation.

The "way" may be a water collection idea devised by researchers at MIT's School of Engineering, in collaboration with colleagues at the Pontifical University of Chile in Santiago. They have repurposed and refined a method used by some native plants and insects here to capture water from the prevalent coastal fog. The marine fog in the Atacama even has a name"?ula camanchaca, which moves inland to provide enough moisture to grown algae, lichens and even some cacti.

The bug inspiration for the researchers is the Namib beetle, whose winged back is bumpy and troughed, allowing the little creatures to collect water from the fog. One of the local flora inspirations is Casuarina equisetfolia, whose thin pine needle-like branchlets are good at capturing fog as water droplets. The challenge for the researchers was to devise a collection device to emulate this biology (biomimicry).

To find the most efficient fog-collection method the researchers experimented with variations in mesh fiber wettability and mesh spacing. The research engineers determined a woven polyolefin, a common, inexpensive plastic, collected about 2 percent of the fog, while finer mesh could collect as much as 10 percent. The experiments determined a fine mesh of stainless-steel filaments about 3-4 times the thickness of human hair worked best. According to the researchers, this inexpensive to manufacture mesh, coupled with a "proper coating," improved efficiency by 500 percent. Currently, the netting yields two liters of water (desalinated by the sun) a day per each square meter of mesh. Researchers believe they can get that figure up to 12 liters per day.