{"id":269274,"date":"2023-05-28T07:36:41","date_gmt":"2023-05-28T07:36:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=269274"},"modified":"2023-05-30T06:19:12","modified_gmt":"2023-05-30T06:19:12","slug":"new-star-trek-style-device-harvests-clean-energy-out-of-thin-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=269274","title":{"rendered":"New Star Trek-style device &#8216;harvests clean energy out of thin air&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><strong>Portable device traps humid air, forming small, man-made thunderclouds\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Researchers compare their tech to harvesting &#8216;electricity from lightning&#8217;<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Matthew Phelan \u2013 Daily Mail May 24, 2023<\/strong><\/h1>\n<p>Just like the\u00a0replicator on Star Trek: The Next Generation, a new clean energy prototype promises to work wonders out of thin air.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers call it Air-gen, a mobile electricity generation device that uses a network of protein nanowires to turn the ambient humidity in the air into contained, synthetic thunderstorms.<\/p>\n<p>This &#8216;human-built, small-scale cloud,&#8217; these scientists said, can produce electricity &#8216;predictably and continuously&#8217; in a wider variety of conditions than sun-dependent solar cells or wind-dependent turbines.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong>The team hopes to see Air-gen scaled up for mass use across the world &#8211; in environments ranging from the Amazon rainforest to the Sahara.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,&#8217; according to the study&#8217;s senior author, Dr. Jun Yao of Massachusetts University Amherst. &#8216;Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt,&#8217; Dr. Yao said, &#8216;but we don&#8217;t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Yao&#8217;s Air-gen solves this problem by replicating the conditions of energy-rich thunderclouds, trapping that charged water vapor inside a network of tiny, nano-scale pores.<\/p>\n<p>Luckily, Yao said, a lot of different materials can be used to harvest energy from this technique.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;It just needs to have holes smaller than 100 nm (nanometers) &#8211; or less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>In fact, when his team first started testing this technology three years ago, they used a specialized material of protein nanowires generated from a bacterial culture of Geobacter sulfurreducens.<\/p>\n<p>Essentially, Yao and his team confirmed that they could continuously harvest\u00a0electricity off a petri dish using their &#8216;Air-gen effect.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>The 100 nm-size is so important to the process, the team says, because it scales to what chemists know as the\u00a0&#8216;mean free path&#8217; &#8211; the distance a single molecule of water vapor can float in midair before it bumps into another.<\/p>\n<p>With these tiny pores, the researchers realized that they could create a build-up of electrical charge as water molecules passed through their nanotubes. The effect is almost like balloons generating static electricity, if they were forced to pass through a tube made of thick carpeting.<\/p>\n<p>The Air-gen system creates a\u00a0charge imbalance, in essence, as the upper end of the pore system builds up a charge in contrast to the lower end, just like the two sides of a battery.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;The idea is simple,&#8217; Yao said, &#8216;but it&#8217;s never been discovered before &#8211; and it opens all kinds of possibilities.\u2019<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/sciencetech\/article-12120135\/New-Star-Trek-style-device-harvests-clean-energy-air.html\">Continues \u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Major breakthrough as scientists find a way to produce clean energy out of nothing but air   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":269276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-269274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Fringe_Science_New_Discoveries_and_Developments"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=269274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269275,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269274\/revisions\/269275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/269276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=269274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=269274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=269274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}