a man is standing in the desert.

He's thirsty, parched, and surrounded by fresh water

but he can't drink.

Why?

He's surrounded by fog.

This isn't actually a riddle, it's a real problem

scientists have been trying to solve for years.

And the solution might just be this little beetle.

It might not look like much,

but it can pull water out of thin air.

Two-thirds of people on Earth face an extreme water shortage

at least one month a year.

Half a billion don't have enough water year-round.

And these numbers are only expected to rise

as climate change takes its toll.

But what many of these regions lack

in traditional water sources, they make up for in fog,

like the Namib Desert.

It's one of the oldest and driest places in the world.

Depending on how far you are from the coast,

rainfall averages about a half-inch to two inches per year.

But it's what we would consider a fog desert,

a place where fog is the main water source

for plant and animal life, like the Namib Desert beetle.

At first glance, this group of beetles

would seem to be really bad at capturing fog.

It's tiny, it's round,

and our current fog-collecting technology

looks nothing like it.

Fog meshes right now are based on leaves

and blades of grass,

and their efficacy is determined

by this complicated formula.

Where these two basically confirm

that fast winds, big droplets,

and slender targets across a large area

are the best conditions for collecting.

And this one represents the mesh's ability

to drain the collected droplets into a reservoir

without clogging.

So, based on the formula, the Namib Desert beetle

shouldn't be able to do what it does.

Since, you know, beetles aren't made of mesh.

And yet, when fog rolls in,

the beetle climbs to the top of a dune

and fog basks, leaning down and into the wind.

Water droplets collect on its back

and roll down to its mouth.

As simple as that sounds, it's very literally

like trying to catch a cloud and pin it down.

Hunter King: If you wave your fingers through mist,

you don't see just a path where your fingers were

and all the water collected.

It just flows with the air, right through them.

Narrator: But the beetle manages to do what we cannot.

The secret is in its exoskeleton.

And it's very much a secret.

King: We are far away from that still,

or we're getting closer.

Narrator: A lot of research has been done

on how the water moves to the beetle's mouth,

but almost none has covered

how the droplets get there in the first place.

Hunter King and his team tried to find the answer

but hit an unexpected bump in the road.

The original beetle

that scientists started researching first had exactly that,

bumps on its exoskeleton.

And those bumps were theorized to have an impact

on the efficiency of fog collection.

But...

King: It turns out the beetle that has the bumps

is not one of the fog-basking beetles.

Narrator: King and his team decided to move forward

with their experiment anyways.

In the lab, they 3D-printed spheres and cylinders

with various surface textures, smooth, ridged, and bumpy.

They then put the spheres in a foggy wind tunnel.

Turns out the sphere with one millimeter bumps

captured fog 2.5 times better than the smooth sphere.

- If you add ridges

that are maybe a little bit like the beetle

that we found is the fog basker,

you go up to something like a factor of two,

so it's still not small.

Narrator: Further research in partnership

with computational fluid dynamics experts

at the University of Illinois, zoomed in even closer.

They developed a computer model

that tested droplets' ability to bump into a surface.

Tiny water droplets have very little inertia,

and have to squeeze a film of air out of the way

before making contact.

The model found that the less squeezing droplets have to do,

the more that bump into the surface,

which is what you should get with rougher textures.

These tiny details are important

for harnessing and recreating these properties

into a usable technology.

King: If we understand the beetle's game,

then we can play it differently towards greater effect.

Narrator: Even a slight increase in efficacy

could improve the lives of people

who rely on current fog capture tech.

And we're not just talking drinking water here,

fog capture can open agricultural doors,

allowing people to raise more crops and livestock.

Identifying these properties is one thing.

But once scientists are able to harness them,

engineers should be able to design

all sorts of fog collectors.

Stand-alone fog-collecting structures, for sure.

But they could also use the material

to coat existing objects

to turn anything into a fog collector.

King: There have been proposals about modifying tents,

say for refugee camps,

if we were to say that these tents

are going to be in a place

where there is enough wind-driven fog,

then you could make bumps on the surface of it.

Narrator: Both King's semi-accidental bump discovery

and the still-unknown qualities

of the actual fog-basking beetle

could help solve the riddle,

giving that man in the desert a better way to drink.

And, potentially, ending water scarcity for good.