As my colleague Bryan Walsh reported back in 2008, wind farms and solar panels aren’t the only places that scientists have been looking for some extra electricity. From knee braces that tap into the energy in a person’s stride to vibration harvesters that soak up energy from the buzz of a busy highway, researchers are hard at work coming up with little ways to plug into the world around us, so to speak. And a new development reported this week in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters may go some distance toward achieving that—and even harvesting enough electricity to power small devices like cell phones or even pacemakers.
