Within a decade or two, we might all be wearing clothing with built-in USB ports capable of recharging our gadgets, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology:
The fiber-based nanogenerator would be a simple and economical way to harvest energy from physical movement,” said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If we can combine many of these fibers in double or triple layers in clothing, we could provide a flexible, foldable and wearable power source that, for example, would allow people to generate their own electrical current while walking.”
That’s all well and good, but my own personal evolutionary goal — a goal which I buy technology to help me facilitate — is to eventually live the life of a completely sedentary goo-back, my every bodily function automated. A shirt that recharges only when I move is going to soon result in a situation where I no longer have a single robotic drone available with enough juice left to clean out my suppurating bed sores.
No, what researchers need to be working on is a way to recharge devices not through motion, but by tapping my inner reserve of self-contempt and hate. That’s an equally eco-friendly power source that’s just going to keep exponentially growing… even as technology evolves and eventually gives me the luxury of ejaculating my skeleton in favor of an infrastructure made up of a series of interconnected bladders.
Power Shirt: Fiber-based Nanotechnology in Clothing Could Generate Electricity by Harvesting Energy from Physical Movement [Georgia Research Tech News]
But ummm that would require us to get out of our chairs and actually ummm move. Sounds like a risky propostion, I might sweat, or as Penny Arcade called it “Its like my body is crying! Am I about to die?”
there’s a video demonstration of this over at Treehugger.com
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/04/power-shirt-generates-electricity.php
very cool, stuff.