Okay. Not hardly. But nanotechnology and hamsters combined are doing some interesting things.
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers who fit special little jackets onto hamsters and then let them run on a treadmill found that the tiny rodents could actually generate power.
According to a press release about their research, they also have also generated electrical current from a tapping finger – moving the users of BlackBerry devices, cell phones and other handhelds one step closer to powering them with their own typing.
"Using nanotechnology, we have demonstrated ways to convert even irregular biomechanical energy into electricity," said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regent's professor in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. "This technology can convert any mechanical disturbance into electrical energy."
The research was detailed Feb. 11 in the online version of the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. Funding was provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force, and the Emory-Georgia Tech Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence.
According to the press release, "The study demonstrates that nanogenerators – which Wang's team has been developing since 2005 – can be driven by irregular mechanical motion, such as the vibration of vocal cords, flapping of a flag in the breeze, tapping of fingers or hamsters running on exercise wheels. Scavenging such low-frequency energy from irregular motion is significant because much biomechanical energy is variable, unlike the regular mechanical motion used to generate most large-scale electricity today."
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