Heat to electricity – US Department of Energy researchers want to convert body heat into gadget-juice

We waste energy all the time. Incandescent light bulbs emit most of their energy as heat, and just a wee bit a visible light. Energy that goes into cooling our refrigerator is wasted as heat. Electrical energy in our computers generate a lot of heat (it’s the reason that laptop is keeping your giblets nice and toasty). Even our bodies are wasting heat-energy all the time. Wouldn’t it be great it we could capture some of that wasted energy and recycle it as electricity?

A team of researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have just made a breakthrough in heat-to-energy conversion. The breakthrough comes in the efficiency of converting heat to electricity. Until now, turning heat into energy has been a wasteful endeavor, but the research team has increased that efficiency “by a factor of 100.”

The thing is, the researchers aren’t exactly sure how their findings actually work, but they hope to be able to use thermoelectric molecules embedded in clothing to “recharge mobile electronic devices off the heat of one’s body.”

Imagine, the next time your mobile phone is running low on juice, just raise your body temp. Sweet, another reason to cuddle up to your significant other. “Hey, honey, my cellphone is low on power, you wanna fool around?” Yup, sounds good to us.

[Via: textually]