Engineers Develop a New Technology to Generate Energy From Evaporating Water

Researchers at Columbia University have developed a new technology capable of generating energy from evaporating water. The technology uses a material made from bacterial spores that expand or contract based on humidity, and that motion can be harnessed to generate electricity, or even power a small machine to move across a table.

Peter Fratzl, director of the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, told Quartz he thinks the technology could be used to power things like phones, but probably won’t be able to produce enough power to “revolutionize transport or other high-power applications.”

GIF via Quartz

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