Across the world, farmers live between floods and droughts. The ground drinks too fast, then cracks too soon. As climate patterns grow more erratic, the balance between water and soil has never been more fragile.
At the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, a team of designers, chemists, and engineers has been working on a material called AquaSteady—a hydrogel made from seaweed that could change how the world grows food. The idea is deceptively simple: take a substance nature already designed to hold water, and use it to help soil do the same.
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