#Cartoon lighting blot how to

We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air.'

Graduate student Xiaomeng Liu, lead author of the latest study, which has been published in Advanced Materials, said: 'This is very exciting. Three years ago the same team showed how electricity could be continuously harvested from the air using a specialised material made of protein nanowires grown from the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens. 'The generic Air-gen effect means that this future world can become a reality.' Clean energy everywhereĭr Yao added: 'Imagine a future world in which clean electricity is available anywhere you go. The technique can be scaled up for use in numerous different environments, from an Amazon rainforest to the Sahara Desert. 'What we've done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.'

#Cartoon lighting blot how to

'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. Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. 'Human-built, small-scale cloud'ĭr Jun Yao, the senior author from Massachusetts University in the US, said: “The air contains an enormous amount of electricity. The holes, called nanopores, make clean power by harvesting the energy from electrically charged water in the air that passes through them.Įssentially, the device harnesses the power in clouds that make lightning. The fingernail-sized contraption, called Air-gen, is made from a material filled with holes less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair. Scientists have created a cloud device that can harvest clean electricity from the humidity in air, an academic paper reveals.