Those wild and insanely intelligent MIT students have discovered a way to get electricity directly from trees. And all this time, I thought that all the rain forest was good for was making diet pills and killing plane crash survivors. Sadly, the trees produce very little electricity. The really crazy thing is that all you have to do to get power from a tree is jab an electrode into the tree and another into the soil. With some techno-yadda yadda, they turn the 200 millivolts produced by the tree into 1.1 volts, and they want to use the resulting power to run sensors. That way, they can finally answer the age old question about the noise produced by trees falling in forests. I think that when a tree falls in the forest, the other trees yell “timberrrr!” and then laugh.

sourcetastic

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