Scientists recently demonstrated a knee brace that generates enough electricity to power a cell phone conversation for 30 minutes from one minute of walking.

The system works similar to the regenerative breaking found in some hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius. At the end of a stride, the brace takes over the task of stopping your leg and generates power while it is doing that. The generator in the device then turns off so you don’t use any more energy taking the rest of your step.

This is a great new idea for yet another way to generate renewable electricity.  Unfortunately, we really don’t see this taking off.  Although practical, we don’t know anyone who would go outside wearing a device like this.
Photo: Greg Ehlers/Simon Fraser University

New York designers Fluxxlab bring us their Revolution Door concept that harnesses the energy from revolving doors when they are pushed around by people.

The door uses gears and an electric generator to create power every time the door is turned in an effort to make our world just a little bit greener. Installing doors like this all over the world would certainly make a difference.

Unfortunately, we don’t see this becoming a reality as few buildings would opt to swap out their doors just to generate some power. However, it’s a great idea for new buildings that are being constructed, and over time the energy could start adding up.

[Via Gizmodo]

Texas Instruments has designed a proof-of-concept chip that uses a tenth of the power of modern-day chips. This is a huge innovation that could lead to far better battery life for anything that uses a chip and is powered by batteries including phones, medical devices, and sensors.

The jump in efficiency was attained by reducing the amount of energy flowing round the chip from 1.0 volts to 0.3. There is also a built-in DC-to-DC converter to greatly reduce power consumption without needing an external unit. Enough of the tech jabber and back to real life.

The chip uses so little energy that it can be completely powered by ambient heat sources, such as the body heat of a human. How awesome is that? We would love to see more advancements in this direction so we can ditch our chargers and power all of our gadgetry with body heat.

A new kind of street lamp called a “Seagull Light” has been spotted at Panasonic’s technology center in Tokyo. These lamps generate the power required to drive them by harvesting wind and solar power. Their cost is quickly covered by the money saved on electricity bills, says Panasonic. As an added bonus, they look very stylish, especially when the wind turbine is spinning.

We think it’s great that Panasonic is developing ways to save electricity and money in such an eco-friendly way. So far it is not clear whether the new lamps will become a commercial product or not, but replacing as many traditional lights as possible with these could save many a penny on electricity bills for cities worldwide.

Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory have developed a flexible solar panel able to collect infrared energy instead of the usual photonic energy.

The panel uses an array of nano-sized antennas that are able to harvest 80% of the available energy (most modern solar panels can only harvest close to 20%). The possibilities are endless with energy-collecting materials like this, and may at one point be used to coat roofs, charge batteries, and even be integrated into polyester fabric.

There is a catch though. The panels cannot currently convert this infrared energy into power that’s useful for electronics. It’s excellent technology for capturing energy, but converting it to 50-60Hz power is the part that isn’t quite working just yet. Hopefully they can iron out the kinks soon so we can take advantage of these panels.

Smartphone company MWg has reportedly announced that later this year it will be offering handsets that don’t require cables to charge.

The new phones will use inductive charging, requiring only that the devices be placed near the charging device for a period of time. This is the same technology that’s in use in many electric toothbrushes and wireless headphones today.

There are still many problems with this system, however. Devices need to be left close to the charger, and charging takes much longer. The charging is also not as efficient as a cable because energy is lost to heat.

Although science is making headway with this technology, it’s still not good enough for use today. Hopefully, though, MWg has something up its sleeve that will surprise us all. Maybe a super-efficient wireless charger? Otherwise, we don’t expect huge sales of these handsets until the chargers are improved.

Cell phones might soon have the ability to predict when they’ll be plugged in and could even intelligently estimate how many calls a user is likely to make over a period of time, based on findings in a paper[pdf] by researchers at Intel and Rutgers University. They would then use that information to provide better battery life.

The devised system, dubbed CABMAN (for context-aware battery management architecture
for mobile devices*), would be based on three main principles:

- The availability of crucial applications should not be compromised by non-important ones
- Opportunities for charging should be predicted to allow devices to determine how much energy they can expect to have, instead of simply going by the battery level
- Context, such as location information, can be used to predict charging opportunities

CABMAN would predict where it can be charged by learning which towers are nearby when it’s plugged in. Then, by tracking location and processing call logs, the system knows when to alert a user to plug the cell phone in or to stop using battery intensive applications (or not do anything at all if it thinks the phone will be plugged in soon). This, for example, could know when to turn off a phone’s music player on an airplane if the phone won’t be able to make any calls soon.

A prototype was tested using data from another project. The software was on average 12 minutes away from predicting charging opportunities - a great result. The future call time prediction didn’t work as well, so more time is needed to perfect that aspect.

This research is showing us a very interesting future for cell phones, indeed. With this kind of “smarts” our future phones will be all but bulletproof, predicting our behavior perfectly and adapting themselves to suit our needs. Hopefully the wait will not be too long.

* Yes, we know that “mobile devices” doesn’t start with an “N” and have no idea who was responsible for naming this project and why this slipped through.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of California at Berkeley have recently discovered a new way of making silicon into a better thermal conductor for turning even small amounts of heat into electricity. Unfortunately, they don’t quite know why it works. No matter, though, as the finding could one day free up power outlets all over our homes by getting rid of the need for chargers.

The scientists found a way to arrange and bend silicon nanowires in a particular fashion that lets them channel heat energy far more efficiently than current thermoconductors. They believe that the new method might be efficient enough to be able to charge the batteries in small technology.

Imagine a cell phone or iPod which will always work, simply because it’s stored in your pocket. This might even be an end to battery meters.