A brand new invention is making the rounds in the scientific community, and it is being hailed as a groundbreaking discovery that could have massive implications worldwide. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley have just created a device that is capable of drawing water straight out of the air.

The technology to do this has been demonstrated before, but this device does it in a far more efficient fashion, and it is able to do it even with dry air. The technology could be a huge benefit to people in developing countries where clean water is hard to find.

The device works by combining metals with organic compounds to create a porous powder that soaks up water vapor. Once they are full, heat is used to release the water.

“This is a major breakthrough in the long-standing challenge of harvesting water from the air at low humidity,” said Omar Yaghi, one of two senior authors of the paper, who holds the James and Neeltje Tretter chair in chemistry at UC Berkeley and is a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “There is no other way to do that right now, except by using extra energy. Your electric dehumidifier at home ‘produces’ very expensive water.”

“One vision for the future is to have water off-grid, where you have a device at home running on ambient solar for delivering water that satisfies the needs of a household,” said Yaghi, who is the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, a co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute and the California Research Alliance by BASF. “To me, that will be made possible because of this experiment. I call it personalized water.”