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."

Comments

The inverse makes silent sub air-conditioning

[MichaelCrawford]

My dad was an engineer for a Naval submarine shipyard. He told me that thermoelectric panels attached to the inside of the hull cooled the submarine silently when a voltage was applied.

Hope that wasn't classified or anything - but then Dad passed away a while back.