Electricity can be generated from the energy of Earth rotating through its own magnetic field—according to a provocative claim put forward by physicists this week.
The findings are controversial but intriguing, researchers told Nature. The effect was identified only in a carefully crafted device and generated just 17 microvolts—a fraction of the voltage released when a single neuron fires—making it hard to verify that some other effect isn’t causing the observations.
“The idea is somewhat counter-intuitive and has been argued since Faraday,” says Paul Thomas, an emeritus physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. But the experiments, led by Christopher Chyba, a physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey, are very carefully done, he adds. “I find it very convincing and remarkable.”
Others agree that the results are striking, but remain sceptical. Rinke Wijngaarden, a retired physicist previously at the Free University of Amsterdam, has followed the authors’ assertions since 2016 and failed to find the effect in his own experiments in 2018. He finds the work very interesting, but is “still convinced that the theory of Chyba et al. cannot be correct.”
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