Scientists Successfully Harvest Hamster Power 
by Andrew Kerr
March 3, 2009

Many of us are familiar with so-called alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar power. But perhaps you have caught yourself wondering, "But what about hamster power?"

Fair question. Georgia Tech nanotechnology researchers have been taking a look at how much energy a running hamster can produce. The thought might sound a bit "old-school"--maybe even "Flintstones" old school--but in fact it's a very modern spin on an old idea.

To be absolutely clear, nobody is seriously proposing a world where animals tied to treadmills power our iPods. But researchers at Georgia Tech have been looking into the amount of power animals (including fidgety humans) can generate. Imagine a world where the very action of typing a text message on your cell phone actually powers the cell phone itself and you begin to see the potential.

We have long known that our own movement can be converted into electricity (I remember in the early 1980s reading about families that hooked up their TVs to stationary exercise bicycles in order to save that family from turning into lumpy couch potatoes). Using large-scale mechanical approaches at least two nightclubs have built a dancefloor that converts the energy of dancing people into electricity; it sounds like a fad until you consider what such technology could do if it were installed on the sidewalks of busy New York City.

But the problem with large-scale mechanical approaches is that it has traditionally taken a lot of work to create a little bit of electricity. That might not be a problem if your "eco-dancefloor" stays packed, but Zhong Lin Wang, a Regent’s professor in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering, sees a world of potential energy sources around us that are available if we use a "nano" approach.

Nanotechnology is the study and development of very small mechanical things. A nanometer is one one-billionth of a meter. Things that tiny react differently to the world around them than things that are much larger.

Imagine that you are trying to harvest energy from my foot tapping along to the Jonas Brothers. Larger instruments used in the past to harvest that energy might find that my tapping foot doesn't even register--I might as well not be producing any energy at all.

However, if we were to use highly sensitive nanowires, each of which are between an-impossible-to imagine 100 and 800 nanometers wide, just the movement of the air disturbed by my tapping foot might be enough to set those wires off. Since the wires can actually detect and react to the effects of my actions, they can now do something. It is through their bending and flexing that the wires create a tiny electrical current.

But Dr. Wang says that the future might be even stranger than hamster power. Imagine wearing devices that are powered by the energy created by the flow of your own blood, or the beating of your heart. If a nanowire can detect it and then vibrate to it, it can create electricity.

As an interesting aside, rats were the original animals used in Dr. Wang's experiments, but they proved too lazy to create substantial amounts of electricity. It was Wang's daughter who came to the rescue and suggested hamsters instead.

For more, read this Georgia Tech press release: "Nanogenerators Produce Electricity from Running Rodents."