At first glance it may seem like a nice colorful game, but in reality it is a refined device designed to produce electricity. It is a device developed by researchers at Columbia University, who used very special materials to create an instrument that uses the humidity present in the air to generate 'clean' electricity. The device was made with colored bricks Lego, a rubber sheet coated with spores, a coil and a magnet. The research was conducted by the professor of biological sciences Ozgur Sahin, who had already developed the device at the tender age of 11 and today had the opportunity to develop it to generate electricity from evaporation.
Evaporation is regarded as the largest form of transfer di energy which occurs in nature, as the climate is fed by evaporating water from the oceans, but it is a type of energy to which man does not yet have access. The exploitation of evaporation to create electricity has therefore been recreated by using spores that are receptive to humidity and by applying to the sheet that contains them devices capable of generating renewable energy using the same energy that the spores use to evaporate the water in natural processes.
To carry out the experiment, the Bacillus, or a common microorganism that when hungry takes on a rigid form and activates a sort of survival mechanism that protects its genetic material. If the environment is humid, the bacillus expands its volume by 40% while in dry conditions the process is proposed the opposite. Here is that the energy used to perform this process can be equated with muscle tension and the movement can be harnessed for produce electricity. This is a very interesting discovery, still in its infancy nowadays, but which can allow the production of infinite quantities of energy by exploiting absolutely natural processes and therefore respectful of the ecosystem.
