An arts venue in Glasgow, Scotland features an innovative dance floor that creates renewable energy from the body heat of dancers.

SWG3 hosts some of Glasgow’s largest dance parties, with thousands of people getting together to dance the night away throughout the year. Starting this month, the dancers won’t just be burning energy by busting out moves but also help keep it warm or cool, depending on the season. That’s thanks to “Bodyheat” an aptly-named dance floor that harnesses the body heat of dancers and converts it into energy. The innovative system has been three years in the making and is a joint project of SWG3 and geothermal energy startup TownRock Energy.

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HandEnergy is an ingenious apple-sized device that charges your phone anytime, anywhere. But what really makes this thing special is the fact that it uses your own personal energy to do it.

In a time where power-banks and solar-power devices have become mainstream, a device that lets you charge gadgets on the go doesn’t sound very special. But while power-banks have to be charged the old fashioned way, and solar panels need the sun to store energy, HandEnergy just needs a hand. And I mean that quite literally. To get this little guy to produce energy, which it then stores in built-in batteries, all you have to do is hold it in your hand and rotate your wrists.

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People are definitely becoming more and more concerned about the environment, also more inventive. Looking for ways to save up energy, the staff of the Helsinki Sea Life Center aquarium in Finland, discovered they had a  totally free energy source living right in their fish tanks – electric eels.

“Our electrician built a device that uses four plastic-encased steel probes to capture the eel’s electrical discharge and feed it to the lights. At feeding time though, it really powers up. You can hear the voltage increasing and the lights shine bright and steady.” explains Markus Dernjatin – from the Helsinki Sea Life Center in Finland.

These deadly deep sea creatures can produce an amount of electrical energy sufficient to light up more than one Christmas tree – around 650 volts. At the same time, the high voltage is enough to kill a grown man…

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Milan Karki, an 18-year-old from Nepal, may have solved the world’s increasing energy problems, by inventing a solar panel that uses human hair instead of expensive wiring.

The young Nepalese, together with 4 classmates, has been trying to come up with a way of producing cheap, renewable energy for his home village ever since he went to school in Kathmandu, but now he dreams of powering up the whole world with his invention.

Milan has discovered hair not only makes us look good, but is also light sensitive and a great energy conductor, because of the melanin it contains. So he replaced the silicon in normal solar panels with human hair and thus invented a new type of solar panel, four times cheaper than the ones on the market today.

The inventor says he has already sent out a couple of his prototypes to districts in Nepal, to be tested for feasibility, but is confident he has found an answer to his country’s energy issues. He says buying half a kilo of human hair is not only cheaper than a set of batteries, but also produces energy for much longer period of time. And anyone can replace the hair, so the solar panel doesn’t require a lot of servicing.

Photos by Tom van Cakenberge/BARCROFT MEDIA

via Daily Mail

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