Water

Being immersed every day in software business and living in a developed country with abundance of everything (but time), we tend to lose track of what is really important. I sometimes realize this myself and remote lone trips to uninhabited parts of the Planet help keep this contact with reality.

For example you realize that drinking water is much more important than a charged powerbank or a low latency Internet connection.

This is BTW why for several years now I've praised the mechanical water filter that's been making a day-and-night difference, allowing to (almost) stop worrying about drinking water everywhere. Well, everywhere except deserts and seas.

Access to drinking water on a sea trip is a big problem. Which may be  counter-intuitive - after all a sea is water. But humans die of dehydration drinking it. It all comes down to salt. Kidneys can only make urine that is less salty than salt water, so to get rid of the salt ingested with a sea water you need to urinate more water than you drink. Otherwise you die of dehydration.

Carbon nanotubes brought  us membranes that stop bacteria. But they are not capable of mechanically blocking NaCl ions. There were attempts to make sieves of graphene, but proved unsuccessful, until recently.

A paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, demonstrates how graphene oxide can be combined with laminates to achieve sieve sizes smaller than the diameters of hydrated ions, affecting water transport only slightly. The result is a membrane that rejects 97% of NaCl, effectively desalinating sea water. That my lead to a simple straw that could be used to drink sea water.