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New Method To Generate Electricity from Water
spaceling writes "The BBC reports reporting on research published in the Institute of Physics Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering of the first new method of generating electricity in over 150 years. Larry Kostiuk and Daniel Kwok 'created a glass block, two centimetres in diameter and three millimetres thick, containing about 400,000 to 500,000 individual channels...[and] generated about 10 volts with a current of around a milliamp. This allowed the team to successfully power a lightbulb.'" This has also been covered all over the place.
True except that Nuclear Reactors don't generate electricity directly - they do so by converting water into steam which powers turbines, and the base technology for that is 150years old or so.
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The energy comes from the water pressure requiredd to force the water to flow through the channels.
See, for instance, http://www.amasci.com/emotor/kelvin.html
Which operates under a very similar principle, but with macrochannels. I built one of these when I was a kid, thirty-some years ago. It is so damn cool, your tongue sticks to it!
Correct. Discovery of the photoelectric effect is credited to Hertz in 1887, so it's less than 120 years old even if you use that discovery, rather than Einstein's explaining how it works.