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Body Heat Could Charge Your Cellphone
An anonymous reader writes to mention Nature is reporting that scientists have discovered a much more efficient way to use silicon to convert heat into electricity. This offers the possibility of many different applications including possibly charging your portable electronics just by wearing them close to your skin. "The concept of converting waste heat into electricity isn't exactly new, but it never really materialized due to efficiency hurdles. Now, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley think they may have found a key [to] increase the conversion efficiency by a factor of 100."
You did not read the article, did you? Of course you didn't, this is slashdot!
The article is talking about using the technology in the clothes and using the energy from that to power a cellphone. This would give you a lot more surface. And I don't know where you live, but "room temperature" here is not so tropical. So the theoretical maximum according to your calculation would be more like ((305-295)/295) * 120 = about 4 watts. Not a lot, but my telephone charger can provide about 2.2 watts and my battery is charged within 2 hours with that...