Scientists use nanoscale pores to harvest humidity
- UMass Amherst researchers said May 23, 2023 that engineered nanoporous materials can continuously generate electricity from atmospheric humidity in laboratory devices. - The key design rule was pores smaller than 100 nanometers, which Jun Yao said let the device act like a small, human-built cloud. - The underlying paper, “Generic Air-gen Effect in Nanoporous Materials,” appeared in Advanced Materials and followed the team’s 2020 protein-nanowire report.
University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers said in a May 23, 2023 release that materials engineered with nanoscale pores can generate electricity from humidity in the air, describing the effect as a laboratory route to continuous power harvesting. The work was tied to a paper in *Advanced Materials* on what the team called the “generic Air-gen effect,” extending earlier results from a 2020 *Nature* paper on protein nanowires. The social-media post circulating on May 22, 2026 repackaged that research with images and video and repeated the researchers’ comparison to a small artificial cloud. The demonstrations shown publicly are laboratory devices, not commercial products. ### What exactly did the researchers say they built? UMass Amherst said the device uses a thin material layer filled with nanopores to convert ambient humidity into electricity. The university said nearly any material could work if it had the right pore structure, and identified the size threshold as holes smaller than 100 nanometers in diameter. Jun Yao, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst, said in the university release that the team had created a “human-built, small-scale cloud” that produces electricity “predictably and continuously.” That cloud comparison is the source of the phrase now being repeated in social posts. (umass.edu) ### How is humidity supposed to turn into electricity here? (umass.edu) The 2023 UMass explanation said the mechanism depends on water molecules moving through pores smaller than the mean free path relevant to air moisture transport. In the team’s description, that size constraint helps create a charge imbalance as moisture passes through the material, allowing a voltage to form between electrodes. (umass.edu) The *Advanced Materials* summary said Yao and co-authors proposed a “leaky capacitor” model to describe how electricity is harvested inside these hydrovoltaic devices and to predict current behavior. That means the paper was not only a demonstration claim but also an attempt to generalize the physics across different nanoporous materials. ### Is this a brand-new discovery from this week? (umass.edu) The May 22, 2026 X post is recent, but the underlying research is not. UMass Amherst published its release on May 23, 2023, and linked the work to a 2020 *Nature* paper in which Yao and Derek Lovley reported power generation from ambient humidity using protein nanowires from *Geobacter sulfurreducens*. The 2023 result was presented as a broader follow-on finding: instead of relying on one specialized biological material, the team said the effect could be reproduced with a broad range of inorganic, organic and biological materials, provided they contained suitably small pores. (advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com) ### How broad is the field beyond this one lab? Nature Communications published a 2022 paper on a self-sustained electricity generator driven by moisture adsorption and evaporation, and the journal has also carried other humidity-power studies. (umass.edu) A 2025 *Nature Communications* paper reported a cellulose hydrogel with confined nanopores for moisture-electric generation, showing the broader field is active beyond the UMass work. A 2025 review in *Nano-Micro Letters* described moisture electricity generation as an emerging area for self-powered electronics and summarized mechanisms including ion diffusion and electric double-layer formation. That literature does not validate every social-media claim, but it does show that harvesting electrical output from atmospheric moisture is an established research topic. ### What has not been shown in the material now circulating? (nature.com) The UMass release and related coverage described prototypes and laboratory demonstrations, not grid-scale generation or mass-market devices. None of the sourced material says the technology is commercially deployed, and none gives evidence that it can yet replace conventional power systems. The next concrete reference point remains the published research record: the 2020 *Nature* paper on protein nanowires and the 2023 *Advanced Materials* paper on the generic Air-gen effect, which are the main sources behind the May 2026 social thread. (link.springer.com) (nature.com) (umass.edu)
