charging your mobile with your body heat...

Yep - the folks at Berkeley seem to think that they're onto a way of using silicon nanowire-based converters to use body heat to charge mobile devices. So far this sort of thing has been too inefficient to be considered, but now that researchers have found a way to improve the efficiency by a factor of 100, things are looking up. Projecting into the future, I can see our electricity bills dropping considerably just by making everyone wear silicon nanowire-based converter jumpers, socks, hats, legwarmers... it just adds a whole new dimension to your thermals :-).

I have to apologise - exciting advances in materials bring out the geek in me...