In addition to a recent breakthrough — the French have overtaken the Chinese in the race for the longest-lasting nuclear fusion reaction (CEA announcement), setting a new record of 22 minutes (YouTube video) — I stumbled upon another fascinating article that deserves attention.

It turns out that it’s possible to generate electricity using the Earth’s magnetic field.
Here’s the paper on arXiv that describes it in detail.

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What’s the Idea?

The authors of the paper — from Princeton University (which also funded the research), Caltech, and Spectral Sensor Solutions LLC — had previously proposed a theory that electricity could be extracted from the Earth’s magnetic field under certain conditions.

Despite the commonly held belief that this is impossible due to the rapid redistribution of electrical charges (which would compensate for any induced electric field), the team has now presented experimental evidence that it can be done.

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How It Works

The key lies in a hollow cylinder made from manganese-zinc ferrite, with a low magnetic Reynolds number (Rm < 1). Under these specific conditions, they observed:

• Maximum voltage and current when the cylinder’s axis is perpendicular to the Earth’s rotation and magnetic field.
• Current and voltage dropped to zero when the cylinder was rotated 90° relative to Earth’s rotation.
• At 180°, the polarity reversed.

They also tested:

• A non-hollow cylinder of the same material — it produced no current.
• A cylinder made from a material with a high Reynolds number — again, no current was generated, regardless of orientation.

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Ruling Out Other Factors

To ensure the results were valid, the team:

• Ruled out thermoelectric effects, radio-frequency interference, and other external noise.
• Repeated the experiment in two different locations, observing the same outcomes.

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What This Could Mean

If the results are confirmed by other research teams (as the authors encourage), we might be looking at a new class of devices that work like perpetual batteries:

• No wear and tear
• No recharging
• No fuel or consumables
• Powered purely by Earth’s magnetic field

Imagine low-power electronics or sensors that could run indefinitely — cleanly and silently — just by existing on Earth.

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Visual: Current Behavior

The paper also included a graph showing current behavior in nanoamperes (nA):

• Blue — 0° orientation → positive current
• Red — 180° orientation → negative current
• Green — 90° and 270° orientations → near-zero current, except for a minor Seebeck effect

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Bonus: Creatine May Not Help After All?

On a completely different note — if you’ve been taking creatine to boost your workouts, you might want to reconsider.

According to this study by Australian scientists, creatine may not actually provide the performance benefits many expect.

P.S.

The above post was originally published in Telegram and was translated using AI. I’ve checked to see it’s generally accurate, but please forgive me if I didn’t find some mistakes it made.

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