Hate humidity? Me too. But science is finding a use for it.
Humidity has never been my friend.
From the sticky, suffocating sauna that can mar your summer to the clammy atmosphere that makes winter even colder, it's just something I'd happily live without.
Especially when I consider the number it does on my naturally frizzy hair.
When I was growing up, the humid summer effect on my hair led the snotty little boys in my 'hood to nickname me "Phyllis" — as in Phyllis Diller, the comedienne with the fright wig trademark.
In high school, I'd fuss and fuss with my hair every morning to make it just perfect. But by the time I walked the mile or so to the bus stop in the damp morning air, I looked less like Farrah Fawcett and more like Gravel Gertie. (Young'uns: Google "Dick Tracy.")
The "big hair" phenom of the '80s and '90s was a godsend. Except that I found myself deep in the Carolinas for a couple of years, where the air is about as thick as Vaseline from March to January. I escaped to Chicago, only to discover the glories of the effect of Lake Michigan on both the two-month summer and the nine-month winter (spring constituting about two weeks in June and fall lasting for about two weeks in September).
And as Big Hair popularity receded, the battle of the locks began anew. Somewhere there's a photo of me and The Late Dog Grendel, a toy poodle whose corkscrew tresses were a perfect match for my own, showing off our poodle hair to full ("full" being the operative term here) effect in 2001.
Nope, I've never cared much for humid air. Can anyone else relate?
But now, however, there might be a reason to love — or at least like — humidity.
Somebody has apparently found a way to create energy out of thick air.
“What we have invented, you can imagine it’s like a small-scale, man-made cloud,” Jun Yao, a professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the senior author of a new study, told The Washington Post. “This is really a very easily accessible, enormous source of continuous clean electricity. Imagine having clean electricity available wherever you go.”
The generator Yao and associates have produced — called, appropriately, an "Air-gen" — produces electricity from the energy in humidity.
"Unlike solar panels or wind turbines, which need specific environments to thrive, Air-gens could conceivably go anywhere," the Post reports.
And get this: These generators are tiny — about the size of a fingernail and thinner than a single hair.
(OK, so does that mean normal hair or thick, coarse hair like mine? The Post doesn't tell me that.)
Water in the air passes through minuscule holes in the device to create a charge. Trouble is, each device produces only a minuscule amount of electricity.
"Yao estimated that roughly 1 billion Air-gens, stacked to be roughly the size of a refrigerator, could produce a kilowatt and partly power a home in ideal conditions," according to the Post.
So we're not ready to cut the cord, so to speak, with Potomac Edison quite yet.
But Yao said their research is just beginning. They're studying how to make it more efficient. The source they're working with, after all, is limitless.
“The entire earth is covered with a thick layer of humidity,” Yao said.
No kidding. I could've told you that, friend.
All I have to do is look in the mirror.
Tamela Baker is a Herald-Mail feature writer.
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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Energy from humidity? Scientists say they can do it
