“There’s a huge variety of ways that we can potentially generate all the power we need for tiny medical sensors or other devices with minimal power needs. But there’s often a big gap between those sorts of use cases and something that could, say, charge your phone as you walk around wearing a sweater. The electricity-producing devices either don’t scale up or start off at such low power levels that you’d need a couple of tents to power a phone.
But today, Nature released a paper that describes a device the authors say should be able to work, providing power for medical sensors on the low end and scaling up to compete with solar panels on the high end. And all the device needs to produce power is ambient humidity. Better yet, the potential for developing the device was accidentally discovered by a grad student who was looking to do something else entirely…”
Read More: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/bacterial-proteins-plus-ambient-humidity-renewable-power/