New Research Promises to Recharge Cell Phones with Your Sweet Voice

Imagine if your cell phone never needed to be recharged. The only caveat is that you have to actually use it by making phone calls, whether it's to your mother who wants to know why you never call, or your significant other to tell them how you much you miss them. Sound a little far fetched? There's new research out there that promises to charge your phone using your voice.
According a report in the U.K.'s Telegraph, electrical engineers at the institute of nanotechnology at Sungkyunkwan University in Seol, South Korea, have developed a new technique that turns sound waves into electricity. This would allow a cell phone to stay charged simply by carrying on a conversation, and by picking up background noise. It can even convert music into electricity when not in use.

The Trick :
The magic trick involves sandwiching strands of zinc oxide between two electrodes. There's a sound absorbing pad on top that vibrates when sound waves hit it, which causes the zinc oxide to compress and release, generating electrical current that can be used to charge a battery.

On "Sleep"

Sleep is a powerful influence on all our lives, and a 60-year-old person has spent almost twenty years asleep. The traditional theory about sleep is that our brain needs to rest for several hours to refresh itself and to 'file' in our memory everything that has happened to us during the day. We can put off sleeping for a limited period, for instance if we go to an all-night party, but sooner or later we have to sleep. If we are not allowed to sleep, we suffer hallucinations, and eventually die.

However, Dr. Ray Meddis has a fascinating new theory. He suggests that we don't really need to sleep at all. We sleep only because our brain is 'programmed' to make us do so. he believes that the sleep instinct originates from prehistoric times. Primitive man was 'programmed' to sleep to protect himself from the darkness with its many dangers. Animals seem to have been similarly programmed. The number of hours they sleep does not depend on physical activity but on how much time they need to eat. Horses, cows and elephants, for example, which spend many hours eating, sleep only 2 or 3 hours. Cats, on the other hand, who have a lot of spare time, sleep for 14 hours a day, more than half their lives.

According to Dr. Meddis, the 'tiredness' we feel at the end of the day is produced by a chemical mechanism in the brain which makes us sleep. We are 'programmed' to feel 'tired' or 'sleepy' at midnight, even if we have spent the day relaxing on the beach or doing nothing. Dr Meddis believes that the unpleasant symptoms we suffer when we don't sleep enough are not because we have not rested but because we have disobeyed our brain's programming. The longer we don't sleep, the worse we feel. But Dr Meddis believes that if scientists could locate and 'turn off' the sleep mechanism in our brain that produces tiredness, we could live completely normal and healthy lives without sleeping. So is sleeping a waste of time? Well, even Dr Meddis does not deny the great psychological value of sleep, and he asks us, "if scientists invented a pill which, if you took it, would keep you awake for ever, would you take it?"