Every year, millions of people incur damage to sensory receptors that interact with the external environment. Two areas concern are hearing loss (affecting around 430 million) and burns 11 million annually). Current treatments for involve skin grafts, which expensive prone rejection by body. implants aids, have limited sensitivity, need batteries charging, expensive, infection. Thus, there is a...

Despite rapid advances in the design and fabrication of miniaturized sensors and devices, their practical applications have been impeded by the lack of suitably miniscule sources of electrical power. Indeed, the generation and storage of electrical energy for mobile devices and systems is one of the most urgent challenges in science and engineering today. Microand nanoscale devices — such as ul...

Stretchable nanogenerators that directly generate electricity are promising for a wide range of applications in wearable electronics. However, the stretchability of the devices has been a long-standing challenge. Here we present a newly-designed ultra-stretchable nanogenerator based on fractal-inspired piezoelectric nanofibers and liquid metal electrodes that can withstand strain as large as 20...

We report the first flexible hybrid energy cell that is capable of simultaneously or individually harvesting thermal, mechanical, and solar energies to power some electronic devices. For having both the pyroelectric and piezoelectric properties, a polarized poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) film-based nanogenerator (NG) was used to harvest thermal and mechanical energies. Using aligned ZnO nanow...