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Origami helps generate electricity

28.04.2017

Zhong Lin Wang, Chenguo Hu of the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences, as part of a US-China team of scientists, have developed a lightweight paper device inspired by the Chinese and Japanese art of paper cutting, which can collect and store energy from body movements. Scientists described their invention in an article published in the journal ACS Nano.

Despite many advances in the field of portable electronic devices, one thing remains the same: sooner or later you need to plug them into an outlet to charge. meanwhile, devices like watches, heart monitors, and hearing aids often require only a small amount of power. Typically, they get this energy from conventional rechargeable batteries.

But scientists decided to see if they could separate our small energy needs from the outlet and get energy from the movements of the user's body. Wang and others have been working on this approach in recent years, building triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) that can harness the mechanical energy around us - like our walking - and then use it to power portable electronics. The problem is that most TENG devices take several hours to charge a small device, like a sensor, and are made of acrylic, which is quite heavy.

So the researchers turned to an ultra-light rhombic paper cut a few inches long and coated it with various materials to turn it into a powertrain. The four outer sides, made of gold- and graphite-coated sandpaper, contained a supercapacitor element for energy storage. The inner surfaces, made of paper and covered with gold and fluorinated ethylene-propylene film, contained the TENG harvester. It is enough to press it for just a few minutes that the device is charged up to 1 volt, which is enough to power the remote control, temperature sensor or clock.

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Sports that extend life 04.12.2016

An international team of researchers led by Emmanuel Stamatakis, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, has analyzed a large body of medical data to find out which sports do and do not extend life.

Scientists used data from 80,3 thousand people over 30 from England and Scotland. The analysis showed that the risk of death for people who regularly played various types of tennis was lower by as much as 47%. For swimmers, this figure was 28%, for aerobics it was 27%, and for cyclists it was 15%.

At the same time, the chances of dying specifically from cardiovascular disease in tennis players were lower by 56%, in swimmers - by 41%, and in people involved in aerobics - by 36%.

There was no association between football/rugby and running/walking activities and time of death.

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