MSN The article is technobabble, but this is the first serious attempt I know of to create a battery that leverages osmosis, and is vertical. Imagine painting your house with special paint, that produces a fractal design of channels, which convey electricity up to the top of the house, by osmosis, like a tree. Apparently, they got pretty good results, because normally collecting electricity requires one material, and moving it requires another, so they combined two materials using osmosis to move more energy. Already, a simple sheet of plastic with the right sized holes in it, can convert water vapor in the air into a surprising amount of electricity, and these kinds of efforts will make it dirt cheap. Instead of solar cells, imagine painting your house, once every ten or twenty years, for a couple hundred bucks at most. Paints are normally self-organizing, made to dry in a specific pattern, with mica, for example, all laying down flat, to form a shield. They're "self-leveling" and adding a fractal pattern should be easy, but these researchers took it step by step to get the math and physics right, for doing it with any number of materials. You could paint your house using their paint for an under coat, then add another one on top, for collecting water and electricity to feed to it, with the right sized pours, and collect the water as well. Using pours, the paint would actually filter the water.
