Images: Energy-saving sensors

Professor Zhong Lin Wang at the Georgia Institute of Technology has devised a sensor that can harvest mechanical energy and convert it into electricity.

The green field is an electron microscope image of an array of zinc oxide nanowires. In the middle is a drawing of how the probe, from an atomic force microscope, bends the nanowires. The third field shows the voltages produced by the array as it is scanned.

Photo by Georgia Institute of Technology