Charge Your Gadgets with Excess Heat
You know that somewhat discomforting warmth that comes from your cell phone when you use it? A lot of people joke that it's the radiation slowly cooking your brain, but really it's just a combination of the heat from the battery, the processors inside your phone, and of course your face. Any time any mechanical or electrical device gets warm (excepting toasters and hair driers and the like) it's a sign of wasted electricity, and two teams of researchers are working on ways to capture that heat and turn it back into power.
The researchers are focusing on the use of nanowires to capture this heat and generate electricity from it. Nanowires are just what they sound like: wires that are very, very small. You'd have to lay somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 of these nanowires side-by-side to equal the width of a human hair. Bundles of the wires are placed between heat sources and, with some chemical and electrical tweaking, are capable of conducting electricity when a temperature difference is applied to them.
Cell phones are the first mentioned application, but think about a car that uses exhaust heat instead of an alternator, or a laptop that charges its battery instead of warming up your lap. The potential is exciting, but is in the very early stages of experimentation, so you won't be finding nanowire regenerative charging in your next gadget for a few years at the very least.
From textually.org and Cellular News
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