If you are the sort of person with a very busy life, where every activity has to be well scheduled, then listen up. Soon you will be able to charge battery-powered devices while working out.

A group of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) researchers recently announced they had produced a device that can harness the energy of small bending motions, transforming it into electrical power.

We may soon be buying shoes with the bendy battery planted inside the soles.

The device is a small stamp-like strip that charges itself when bent or twisted. This ‘bendy-battery’ works really well with everyday activities, such as walking and exercising. What is even better, is that this device can be produced inexpensively at a large scale. The device material is inherently flexible and compatible with many wearables and not likely to break under stress.

For those who get tired of jogging rather quickly, there is some very good news. The frequency at which the strip bends does not really matter. The new technology will still work at a slower rate. But for the stellar athletes among us, running means you are pressing harder on the strip, which will charge the strip faster.

We may soon be buying shoes with the device planted inside the soles. The device can also be embedded within pavements, where pedestrians pressing on these strips generate enough energy to light up our streets.

The idea of harnessing motion to generate electrical power is not new. There have been devices designed to harness motion energy based on say, friction.

Remember the fun experiment of rubbing a balloon against a wool sweater? That’s an electrostatic generator. Another example is piezoelectrics – crystals that produce a small voltage when bent or compressed. But for these devices to work, high frequency sources of motion are required. In contrast, the new device is very much suited to lower frequency motion, such as what happens when we walk.

The future looks bright for the ‘bendy-battery’. The cost is cheap, the device itself is lightweight and durable, and the team is already in contact with a number of start-up companies to market the product. One small step for man: a few more seconds of battery life to upload that last gym selfie for the day.

Did you know…

• Unless food is mixed with saliva you cannot taste it.

• Since 1959, more than 6,000 pieces of ‘space junk’ (abandoned rocket and satellite parts) have fallen out of orbit. Many of these have hit the earth’s surface as small meteors.

• The air pollution and smog in Beijing and Shanghai are sometimes so bad the airports are shut down because of poor visibility.

• Although oxygen gas is colourless in gas form, the liquid and solid forms of oxygen are blue.

For more trivia access www.um.edu.mt/think

Sound bites

• Chemists at the University of Texas have created nanoparticles that can suppress liver tumours without damaging the organ. Before the discovery potential tumour suppression drugs used to cause so much damage that the loss in using them outweighed the benefit. The new method may provide dramatic extended survival periods.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160125160352.htm

• The gravitational waves detector last week – which proved Einstein right 100 years on – still took 1.3 billion years to reach us despite moving at the speed of light. This means the event that was ‘seen’ or ‘heard’ happened in another galaxy. The two black holes in question were roughly 30 times the mass of the sun, however, on collision they released the equivalent of three times the energy stored in the mass of the sun in the form of gravitational waves.

www.theguardian.com/science/across-theuniverse/2016/feb/11/todays-gravitational-wave-announcement-could-be-two-great-discoveries-in-one