'It was an accident': the scientists who have turned humid air into
renewable power
...
...
In May, a team at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst
published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small
but continuous electric current from humidity in the air. It's a claim
that will probably raise a few eyebrows, and when the team made the
discovery that inspired this new research in 2018, it did.

"To be frank, it was an accident," says the study's lead author, Prof
Jun Yao. "We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for
humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was
working on that forgot to plug in the power."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/02/it-was-an-accident-the-scientists-who-have-turned-humid-air-into-renewable-power

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