From moisture to electricity: Scientists show off how kitchen items can power wearables and smart home devices
Scientists at Queen Mary University of London have developed a device that converts ambient moisture into electricity. The Moisture-Electric Generator (MEG) utilizes common kitchen ingredients like gelatin, table salt, and activated charcoal. This innovative technology could potentially power wearables and smart home devices by harnessing humidity from the air or human skin.
- ▪The Moisture-Electric Generator (MEG) turns moisture into usable electricity.
- ▪It is made from gelatin, table salt, and activated charcoal, all of which are common kitchen items.
- ▪The device absorbs water molecules from the air or skin and separates into layers as it dries.
Digital Trends files mainly under tech. We currently carry 623 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Digital Trends |
| Canonical URL | https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/from-moisture-to-electricity-scientists-show-off-how-kitchen-items-can-power-wearables-and-smart-home-devices/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 23 May 2026 19:06:43 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-23T19:12:27.583Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T19:12:27.583Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | L3UgzctaB2ly |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
What if the humidity in the air around you could charge your fitness tracker or power your smart home sensors? That is exactly what an international research team led by scientists at Queen Mary University of London has achieved. Their new device, called a Moisture-Electric Generator or MEG, turns ambient moisture into usable electricity using just three ingredients you could find in any kitchen: gelatin, table salt, and activated charcoal. How does it work? Science Direct The MEG works by absorbing water molecules from the surrounding air or directly from human skin. When the gelatin and salt mixture dries, it naturally separates into three distinct layers without any complex manufacturing steps.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Digital Trends.