How cool is this! A new fabric that generates electricity.

U.S. scientists have developed a microfibre fabric that generates its own electricity, making enough current to recharge a cell phone or ensure that a small MP3 music player never runs out of power.

If made into a shirt, the fabric could harness power from its wearer’s simply walking around or even from a slight breeze, they reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“The fibre-based nanogenerator would be a simple and economical way to harvest energy from the physical movement,” Dr. Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who led the study, said in a statement.

The nanogenerator takes advantage of the semiconductive properties of zinc oxide nanowires – tiny wires one-thousandth the width of a human hair – embedded into the fabric. The wires are formed into pairs of microscopic brush-like structures, shaped like a bottle brush.

via Globe and Mail