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 exploits the humidity present in the air to generate 'clean' electrical energy. 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 Free 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 considered to be the largest form of transfer di the energy which occurs in nature, as the climate is fueled 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 electrical energy was therefore recreated by using spores that are receptive to humidity and by applying devices capable of generating renewable energy to the sheet that contains them, exploiting the same energy that the spores use to evaporate the water in natural processes.
To carry out the experiment, the Bacillus, that is, a common microorganism that when hungry takes on a rigid shape 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 reversed. Here the energy used to carry out this process can be equated to muscular tension and the movement can be exploited for produce electricity. This is a very interesting discovery, nowadays still in its embryonic stage, but which can allow the production of infinite quantities of energy by exploiting absolutely natural processes and therefore respectful of the ecosystem.