Energy

Your eyes blink roughly 14 to 20 times a minute, and every one of those movements is wasted energy. Engineers at Northwestern University have found a way to put that motion energy to work, powering a pair of battery-free health-sensing glasses.

Germany is taking wind power to new heights. The world’s tallest turbine now stands 365 m (1,198 ft) in Schipkau, where it aims to tap stronger, steadier winds and test whether existing wind farms could grow upward with a second story.

Researchers have developed a paper-thin foot membrane that lets crawling microrobots harvest electricity directly from the ground beneath them, ditching heavy onboard batteries by turning metal and silicon surfaces into an active power source.

Your walls might one day do more than hold up the building. Researchers at Binghamton University have created a wallpaper-style paper that generates electricity from indoor humidity, and it can soak up and release moisture to help regulate it.

Even though clothing is a fundamental human need, it doesn't seem to be advancing as rapidly as many others. Scientists have now created a textile that can cool, detect movement, and generate electricity without external systems or multiple layers.

Researchers at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute have developed a method to quantify the structural aging of tissues from a snapshot of their cellular architecture.

Shawn Ryan rode 1,300 km (808 miles) across the Alps on a sun-powered e-bike he built himself, pushing his solar panels, motor, and batteries to their limits amid the grueling heatwave that swept across Europe this summer.

A floating hydrogen platform that delivers clean power to docked ships – no port construction needed – has passed key engineering tests with early stage deployment talks underway at five major global ports.

When you think of glass, you probably picture something fragile and brittle, not a material built for high-stress electromechanical components. Yet researchers are significantly improving the efficiency of electric motors by using “glass” parts!

In the South China Sea, the aqua-colored waters of an expansive shallow reef platform suddenly gives way to a near vertical shaft of vast darkness – an ocean sinkhole almost entirely devoid of oxygen and, in turn, marine life as we know it.

The IAA Mobility trade show in Munich was bound to throw some really unusual motos our way. But most wouldn't have put their money on the first Volkswagen vehicle to run on a solid-state lithium-metal battery to be a Ducati superbike.

Looking forward to a future where laser beams replace power lines, DAPRA's Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER) program has set new records for transmitting more power wirelessly over longer distances.