As you probably know by now, heat is often produced by electrical devices. Easy Bake Oven's, computers, stereos, TV's, etc...

What you may not know already is that heat can be converted to electricity and thereby get some of that energy back. Due to losses in the process, this is not magic or run forever technology. What might come from this newest research is a much longer run time on devices we use and for those that plug in, a much higher efficiency.

From the article:

"Hagelstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT, says existing solid-state devices to convert heat into electricity are not very efficient. The new research, carried out with graduate student Dennis Wu as part of his doctoral thesis, aimed to find how close realistic technology could come to achieving the theoretical limits for the efficiency of such conversion."

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