A breakthrough in nanotechnology means it may soon be possible to harvest electrical energy from the vibrations caused by a human voice--just enough to add some charge to your cell phone. The trick is for it to work really well, you'll have to
A breakthrough in nanotechnology means it may soon be possible to harvest electrical energy from the vibrations caused by a human voice--just enough to add some charge to your cell phone. The trick is for it to work really well, you'll have to actually shout. Which certainly adds a new annoyance to the cell phone use list (just below that guy on the phone while paying for his Starbucks right... now.)
Energy recovery systems are becoming more and more useful every day--they're a way for quotidien activities to also generate useful amounts of electricity, which has the benefit of being largely carbon neutral and thus a pretty green way to create new sources of power. You already discovered this tech when you encountered exercise bikes in gyms aren't hooked up to the grid. And in Japan, special energy-harvesting platforms are actually used in some train stations to power the ticket machines via the energy of stomping commuter shoes. The difficulty is that on a very small scale, it's hard to collect enough energy from the actions of a human body for it to be useful enough to even bother harvesting in the first place. The tech is advancing though, propelled often by nanotech developments: Like this new one from Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul.
The team of scientists have been looking at the properties of nano-scale strands of zinc oxide (a relatively inexpensive source material) and have worked out how to trap them between two flexible electrodes. When an incoming sound wave hits the flat top pad of the device, it acts to compress and then release the zinc nanowires inside. Thanks to the odd electrical properties of the wires, this ac