Power Felt: Finally, power in your pants
Dan Seitz 
Scientists are so adorable in their naive belief in things like “wearable computing”. Their sincere belief that we’d be caught dead in a skintight jumpsuit because it charges our phone is just so cute. But that hasn’t stopped them from developing clothes that can charge your phone, for some reason.
The latest achievement? Power Felt. No, it’s not a line of exercise clothes for lesbians. It’s a new kind of cloth that puts electricity in your pants.
Power Felt consists of a weave of carbon nanotubes, science’s latest miracle substance, and plastic fibers. Despite the sound, it apparently feels just like cloth, although scientists are unusually attached to rayon, so take that with a grain of salt.
What’s unique about Power Felt is that it’s thermoelectric: that is, it generates electricity from temperature changes. So, for example, if you were wearing Power Felt shorts and stepped out from an air-conditioned room into a sweltering July day, your shorts would crackle with electricity. Also, they’d generate electrons.
There are applications that we might actually use, such as Power Felt being used to collect wasted heat energy in cars and channel it back to the battery. But mostly we think it will serve as a valuable cheap scientific joke about pants power, along with asking people to examine Uranus.
Power Felt Gives a Charge [Wake Forest University]
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