"Back in the early eighties, my father had a joke he loved to tell non-engineers about the then nascent technology of mobile phones; the punchline sees the customer, heretofore staggered by the miniaturisation of the handset he’s just bought, daunted by the ludicrous size of the power supply. While those days are long behind us (and my father should be posthumously forgiven, as he started working with computers when they still filled entire floors), the problem remains: the more electronic hardware we want to carry around with us, the more reliable and equally portable a source of juice we need to keep it running. And given that our near future is posited to be crammed with everyware, ubicomp, body area networks and cyberpunkish augmented reality contact lenses, there’s money in being the first to come up with the solution. Money or military advantage, perhaps… indeed, good ol’ DARPA who are one of the big players in this field, because the amount of hi-tech kit the average soldier has to cart about is becoming a serious issue (not least for the soldiers themselves). Their proposed solution? Scavenge the wasted energy from the human body carrying the kit [via BoingBoing]:" - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet