Design & Lifestyle...

In Soviet Russia shirt powers you! In the future this might actually be true. Nanotechnology researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are developing a shirt that harvests energy from the wearer’s physical motion and converts it into electricity for powering small electronic devices worn by soldiers in the field, hikers and other users.

A scanning electron microscopy image shows the piezoelectric zinc oxide nanowires. The two sets of nanowires meet teeth-to-teeth, allowing the gold-coated microfibers to scrub those not coated with gold to produce electricity via a coupled piezoelectric-semiconducting process. This is the fundamental concept of a "power shirt."