into what they call the "Air-gen effect." The basic idea? Growing conducive nanofilms out of bacteria that can pull small amounts of electricity from the water vapor in the air.
"The air contains an enormous amount of electricity," Yao said in the school's statement. "Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt—but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning.
"What we realized after making the Geobacter discovery," Yao said, "is that the ability to generate electricity from the air... turns out to be generic: literally any kind of material can harvest electricity from air, as long as it has a certain property." That property, the research update notes, is what's known as the "mean free path" or distance between molecules. In the case of water molecules suspended in air, that distance is 100 nanometers, or a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair.
So long as the film has those tiny perforations, his team says, the material seems to be irrelevant. Though the team is mostly focused on generating minuscule amounts of electricity for wearable devices right now — already raising interesting new possibilities for consumer tech — the real question is likely to be how far the phenomenon can scale.
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