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Pee power

It gives power walking a whole new meaning. A pair of socks developed at the University of the West of England can generate electricity from urine. Walking in the socks pumps a bladder’s worth of urine through integrated tubes towards microbial fuels cells containing bacteria that guzzle nutrients and churn out electricity. The team used the system to run a wireless messaging system.

1 million

Temperature in °C of the plasma in Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X fusion reactor, which was switched on for the first time last week.

Solar skin

Would you wear solar power on your wrist? Tape an organic solar cell directly onto your skin and you can generate enough energy to run a digital watch. Developed at the University of California, San Diego, the cell is around half the size of a credit card. It’s designed to power the growing array of wearable devices becoming available – smartwatches, fitness trackers and biomedical devices. The lab successfully used it to power an LED as well as a digital watch.

(Image: Wulf Voss/EyeEm/Getty)