Here's the paper behind the story. There is some interesting detail there. From their result it seems that this sort of mechanism can be constructed with a wide range of materials both organic and inorganic. So there a lot of possibilities for how to apply the idea. <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/adma.202300748" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/adma.202300...</a>
Something similar happened when I put a dehumidifier in my bedroom.<p>Basically, I noticed that the room was heating significantly when I turned it on. Way faster than what you should expect from its power usage (about 250W avg.).<p>Correct me if I'm wrong, but by converting air moisture to liquid water using a compressor, the dehumidifier is releasing the latent energy of water vapor (0.627Wh/L) in addition to its own energy usage.<p>I measured that my dehumidifier required +/- 1kW/h to get 1L of liquid water from the room. This it's overall heating efficiency is about 1.6x, which is way better than any electric heating system that is not an heat-pump.
Despite being a chemist, I don’t fully follow this, though it seems legitimate.<p>But if there’s that much latent energy, I really have to think that there could be some kind of atmospheric, “local ecological” side effect on microorganisms or “something” at scale. It’s not like nature lets massive amounts of energy go completely unused.
The paper says a cubic meter of the material could generate more than a kilowatt (per hour?)... sounds promising if it actually gets commercialized.<p>I assume it would only work well in places where there are significant humidity swings, I didn't read the paper very carefully though.<p><a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/adma.202300748" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/adma.202300...</a>
> Plus, it’s tiny, meaning thousands of devices could be stacked atop one another without upping its carbon footprint.<p>What does this mean? Was this written by AI that can't distinguish between a physical footprint and a figurative carbon one?
Feeling a little skeptical, but I'd love for someone to explain where the energy is coming from. From the paper:<p>In fact, an Air-gen device made from protein nanowires, which was kept in the ambient environment for over 3 years, still produced a similar voltage output ...These time spans are much longer than the typical hydration time, supporting the sustainable mechanism based on a dynamic equilibrium ...
The Air-gen device is not a “perpetual motion engine”, because the energy comes from the electrostatic energy (not kinetic one) of discrete water molecules in a vast open source.<p>Does this mean that the energy they're harvesting is a result of imparting a charge on otherwise neutrally charged water molecules, but because it's infinitesimally small compared with the "vast source", you can disregard any net effect from the perspective of the harvester?<p>If so, this doesn't feel "right", because this implies that a charged particle's state is at a lower energy state than a neutral one. If that were so, wouldn't the universe tend to that lower energy state by default?<p>Again, I'd appreciate if someone could tell me where the energy is supposed to be coming from, because "TANSTAAFL" seems to be being violated here.