Basically the rubber snakes are moored at the right height to bend as a wave rolls past, generating a bulge in the sea water inside. This gets pushed down the tube by the wave to a generator built into the tail end.

A full-scale device would be able to generate enough power for 1,000 homes, and the developers at the University of Southampton think it may be more resilient than other wave-generators due to its lower moving part count, and the fact that it's made mostly of materials that resist salt-water corrosion.

Plus, it looks satisfyingly sci-fi, in a scary surprise for divers kinda way. [New Scientist]

The biggest trick was in working out how to cool the chips from all the extra thermal input created by the focused sunlight. To do this, IBM borrowed ideas from its own research into a liquid metal cooling system developed for semiconductors and used a thin liquid metal gallium-indium compound to bind the chip to a cooling block.

This new high power technique could of course result in smaller solar farms, or higher energy output from existing systems. Best of all, it's potentially a fairly low cost solution, which can only be a good thing for the environment. [Physorg]

It seems like a great eco-friendly idea, especially when you consider project leader Dave Worsley's figures: if just one manufacturer made all their steel cladding energy-producing, it would have the same generator capacity as 50 wind farms.

Admittedly it's more "paint your warehouse" than "paint your home", since few of us have steel walls or roofs on our abode, but it's still pretty nifty. The technology in the Swansea Solar Paint project is apparently easily scalable, so it may only be a matter of time until it's being cranked out by the square yard, saving the environment and generating the 1.21 gigawatts of power needed to send you Back to the Fut— ... well, you get the point. [Inhabitat]

Professor Zhong Lin Wang and team of the Georgia Institute of Technology coated kevlar strands with zinc oxide nanowires, protecting the bushy wires with a polymer and adding gold to other fibers to act as a conductor. The piezoelectric power-generating action comes when the nanowires bend as two fibers rub together, translating bending of the material into electricity which flows along the gold fibers.

Professor Wang says that across several square feet of fabric the nanowire fibers can generate power adding up to tens of milliwatts, which is not a huge amount, but is certainly enough for a dribble top-up charge for your portable devices.

With a little more power, the idea could be great in smart fabrics for consumers, or even for medical or military use, but it's clearly an invention in its infancy—as Wang notes, "What we've done is demonstrate the principle and the fundamental mechanism." For the time being it also has a fundamental flaw: it's not waterproof, and putting your smart clothes in the wash would dissolve the nanowires. [BBC News and Reuters]