This is amazing, if not of necessarily huge impact. From Phys.org:
Large quantities of fish are consumed in India on a daily basis, which generates a huge amount of fish “biowaste” materials. In an attempt to do something positive with this biowaste, a team of researchers at Jadavpur University in Koltata, India explored recycling the fish byproducts into an energy harvester for self-powered electronics.
The basic premise behind the researchers’ work is simple: Fish scales contain collagen fibers that possess a piezoelectric property, which means that an electric charge is generated in response to applying a mechanical stress. As the team reports this week in Applied Physics Letters, they were able to harness this property to fabricate a bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator.
To do this, the researchers first “collected biowaste in the form of hard, raw fish scales from a fish processing market, and then used a demineralization process to make them transparent and flexible,” explained Dipankar Mandal, assistant professor, Organic Nano-Piezoelectric Device Laboratory, Department of Physics, at Jadavpur University.
The collagens within the processed fish scales serve as an active piezoelectric element.
“We were able to make a bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator—a.k.a. energy harvester—with electrodes on both sides, and then laminated it,” Mandal said.
I wonder if there are any applications of this collagen directly as medical materials, such as building the framework for heart muscle. Given the electrical requirements for heart muscles to work…..
(h/t Megan Treacy @ Treehuggers.com)
