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Frank Herbert's Moisture Traps May Be a Reality
Omomyid writes "In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune,' Frank Herbert envisioned the Fremen collecting water from the air via moisture traps and dew collectors. Science Daily reprints a press release from the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, where scientists working with colleagues from Logos Innovationen have developed a closed-loop and self-sustaining method, no external power required, for teasing the humidity out of desert air and into potable water."
It's illegal because their water rights are based on a first come (excluding Indians) basis. Conventional wisdom (since disproven) was that collecting rainwater prevented it from going to it's rightful owners. More recent scientific studies have demonstrated that only 3% of rainwater ends up in the waterways.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Given the state of scientific knowledge in 1965 (when dune was published) it's a lot harder SF than some people seem to realise.
Herbert did some serious background research for Dune IMO.
Sure bits of it seem *now* to us as absurd as Doc Smith's diesel-engined spacecraft, but in 1965, 12 years after the discover of DNA, 17 years after the initial formalisation of classical information theory, when computers were still mostly small-room-sized, the idea the genetic code could pass down memories wasn't all that outlandish a hypothesis - in fact it seemed pretty reasonable. If you were writing now you'd probably come up with people being genetically engineered to add informational appendicies to germ line DNA rather than the ability being built-in by evolution, but there's nothing impossible about it. And if you pay attention to the books, you'll note that being able to "see the future" doesn't work in a naive way either, it's clearly been modelled on "quantum collapse" and "many fingered time" that any passing 1960s physicists would have talked the ear off Herbert about.
And with very powerful figures *right now* calling for the Death of the Internet, is a ban on computing devices really that outlandish? Sure, the chances of them winning are slim in practice, but still.