Scientists May Have Discovered How To Extract Power From the Earth's Rotation

Long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam writes:

No more burning fossil fuels, playing with fissile material, damming rivers, erecting wind mills, or making solar panels. All of our energy needs could potentially be supplied by the angular kinetic energy of the Earth — and because of the mass of the planet, doing so would slow its rotation down by a mere 7ms per century. [Which is similar to speed changes caused by natural phenomena such as the Moon's pull and changing dynamics inside the planet's core.']

Normally this would be considered impossible as the Earth's large and uniform field does not induce a current in conductors, but researchers believe that a hollow cylinder of manganese, zinc and iron can alter the interaction with our planetary magnetic field and allow the extraction of energy from it. So far, the results are positive but still below the level where they cannot be explained by multiple possible causes of experimental error. Further research is required to confirm the effect.

'The effect was identified only in a carefully crafted device and generated just 17 microvolts,' reports Scientific American, '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.'

But if another group can verify the results, the experiment's lead says the next logical step is trying to scale up the device to generate a useful amount of energy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.