Monday, September 14, 2009

Trees Become Electric? Scientists Bring out the Spark!

From the wonderful Huffington Post is this article about an 'electrifying' (pardon the pun) new discovery! Scientists at The University of Washington have discovered that trees may be a new source of electricity! Here's more from the article:

"...In an experiment that will seem familiar to students of the potato, the scientists stuck one electrode into a bigleaf maple, and another in the ground, and saw that the tree generated a tiny stream of electricity -- a few hundred millivolts. That's not enough electricity to do much ... but run a circuit and get published in the scientific journal Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Transactions on Nanotechnology.


Photo: University of Washington

(As of that potato, this experiment is different, the authors said: "The tree-power phenomenon is different from the popular potato or lemon experiment, in which two different metals react with the food to create an electric potential difference that causes a current to flow." The tree experiment uses the same metal for both electrodes.)"

Read the rest here - the future looks bright!

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