Skip to main content

Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

3 comments

Scientists Create Rubber-Like Material That Turns Body Heat Into Electricity

Imagine wearing a smartwatch, fitness tracker or health-monitoring patch that can stretch and move naturally with your skin while generating its own electricity from body heat. Such technology could reduce the need for conventional batteries and make wearable electronics more comfortable and convenient.

Now, researchers led by Kai Liu and his team have developed a new type of thermoelectric material that could bring this possibility closer to reality. Unlike conventional thermoelectric materials, which may bend but cannot stretch like rubber, this new material combines high thermoelectric performance with remarkable elasticity.

The researchers have developed one of the first n-type thermoelectric elastomers, a material that can stretch, recover its original shape and continue converting temperature differences into electrical energy.

The development could open new possibilities for self-powered wearable devices, flexible medical electronics and personal temperature-control systems.

What Makes This Material Different?

Thermoelectric materials have the ability to convert heat differences directly into electricity. When one side of a thermoelectric material is warmer than the other, it can generate an electrical voltage. This phenomenon is known as the Seebeck effect.

This technology is particularly interesting for wearable electronics because the human body continuously produces heat. A thermoelectric generator placed close to the skin could potentially use the temperature difference between the body and the surrounding environment to produce electricity.

However, there is an important challenge.

Most high-performance thermoelectric materials developed so far are rigid or flexible rather than truly elastic. Flexible materials can bend around the body, but they generally cannot stretch significantly and return to their original shape.

This becomes a problem for wearable devices because human skin and muscles constantly move. A material that cannot stretch comfortably may lose contact with the skin, become damaged or affect the performance of the device.

The new thermoelectric elastomer addresses this limitation by combining electrical performance with rubber-like elasticity.

A Material That Can Stretch Up to 150%

One of the most impressive features of the newly developed material is its ability to withstand strains of up to 150% while recovering its original shape.

In simple terms, this means the material can be stretched considerably beyond its original length and then return towards its initial form.

This level of elasticity is important for devices that need to follow the natural movements of the human body.

For example, a thermoelectric generator attached to an elbow, wrist or knee must handle repeated bending and stretching. Traditional materials may struggle under these conditions, but an elastic thermoelectric material could maintain better contact with the skin.

The researchers also report that the material maintains strong thermoelectric performance even when mechanically deformed.

This combination of stretchability and electrical performance is what makes the development particularly interesting.

How Did Scientists Make It Elastic?

Creating a material that is both highly elastic and electrically conductive is not easy.

Normally, adding insulating polymers to thermoelectric materials can reduce their electrical performance. These polymers may improve flexibility and elasticity, but they can also interfere with the movement of electrical charges.

The research team approached this problem by combining three important techniques into a single material.

These include uniform bulk nanophase separation, thermally activated crosslinking and targeted doping.

Each technique plays a different role in improving the material.

1. Uniform bulk nanophase separation

The researchers designed the material so that its different components formed a carefully organized structure at the nanoscale.

This process helped create semiconducting polymer nanofibrils distributed throughout the material. These nanofibrils are important because they provide pathways through which electrical charges can travel.

2. Thermally activated crosslinking

Crosslinking is a process in which polymer chains are connected through chemical bonds, creating a network-like structure.

This network helps the material maintain its shape and recover after stretching.

In this research, thermally activated crosslinking helped give the material its rubber-like mechanical properties.

3. Targeted doping

Doping involves adding specific substances to a semiconductor to change the number of available electrical charge carriers.

The researchers used targeted doping to increase the concentration of electrons in the semiconducting polymer.

This helped improve the material's ability to conduct electricity.

Together, these techniques allowed the team to create a material with both strong electrical properties and impressive elasticity.

Why Adding Polymers Actually Improved Performance

One particularly interesting finding challenges a common assumption in thermoelectric material research.

Scientists generally expect insulating polymers to reduce electrical performance because they dilute the active semiconducting component.

However, the researchers discovered that carefully selecting the elastomer and doping materials could produce a beneficial internal structure.

The elastomers helped form uniformly distributed semiconducting polymer nanofibrils wrapped in elastic material.

These nanofibrils created efficient pathways for electrical charge transport, while the surrounding elastomer helped maintain the material's mechanical flexibility.

The structure also produced an important thermal advantage.

It improved electrical conductivity while decreasing thermal conductivity.

This combination is extremely useful for thermoelectric materials because good thermoelectric performance requires electricity to flow efficiently while limiting the movement of heat through the material.

In other words, the material needs to conduct electrical charges without allowing heat to pass through too easily.

By improving both properties simultaneously, the researchers were able to achieve thermoelectric performance that rivals flexible inorganic materials.

Why Is Thermoelectric Performance Important?

Scientists commonly evaluate thermoelectric materials using a measurement called the figure of merit, represented by the symbol ZT.

A higher ZT value generally indicates better thermoelectric performance.

It depends on several factors, including electrical conductivity, the Seebeck coefficient and thermal conductivity.

A material with high electrical conductivity and low thermal conductivity can maintain a larger temperature difference across itself, potentially improving its ability to generate electricity.

The newly developed elastomers demonstrate high figure-of-merit values even under mechanical deformation.

This is important because a wearable energy generator must do more than perform well in a laboratory when it is sitting still. It must also continue working when stretched, bent or moved.

Potential Applications in Everyday Life

The combination of elasticity and thermoelectric performance could make these materials useful in several emerging technologies.

Self-powered wearable electronics: Smartwatches, fitness trackers and health-monitoring patches could potentially use body heat to generate some of the electricity needed for their operation.

Soft bioelectronics: Medical devices designed to remain attached to the skin could become more comfortable because the material can stretch naturally with body movements.

Personal temperature regulators: Elastic thermoelectric devices could potentially be integrated into wearable systems designed to help regulate temperature around the body.

Flexible energy-harvesting systems: The material could support the development of thermoelectric generators that conform to curved and moving surfaces rather than requiring rigid structures.

These applications remain potential future uses, and further development will be needed before the material becomes part of everyday commercial devices.

A Step Towards Battery-Free Wearable Technology

The development of elastic thermoelectric materials represents an important step towards making wearable electronics more adaptable and potentially self-powered.

Until now, researchers have faced a difficult trade-off: materials with strong thermoelectric performance were generally not sufficiently elastic, while highly stretchable materials often suffered from poor electrical properties.

Kai Liu and his team have demonstrated a way to address this challenge by combining nanostructure engineering, polymer crosslinking and targeted doping.

The result is a thermoelectric elastomer that can withstand up to 150% strain while maintaining impressive electrical performance.

Although further research is needed to improve practical energy generation and long-term durability, this approach could help bring more comfortable, stretchable and energy-harvesting wearable devices closer to reality.

In the future, the heat naturally produced by our bodies could become a useful energy source for the electronic devices we wear every day.

Reference: Liu, K., Wang, J., Pan, X. et al. n-Type thermoelectric elastomers. Nature 644, 920–926 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09387-z

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular

Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

For years, scientists believed that adding even one qubit (a unit of quantum information) to a black hole needed energy. This was based on the idea that a black hole’s entropy must increase with more information, which means it must gain energy. But a new study by Jonah Kudler-Flam and Geoff Penington changes that thinking. They found that quantum information can be teleported into a black hole without adding energy or increasing entropy . This works through a process called black hole decoherence , where “soft” radiation — very low-energy signals — carry information into the black hole. In their method, the qubit enters the black hole while a new pair of entangled particles (like Hawking radiation) is created. This keeps the total information balanced, so there's no violation of the laws of physics. The energy cost only shows up when information is erased from the outside — these are called zerobits . According to Landauer’s principle, erasing information always needs energy. But ...
3 comments
Read more

Black Holes That Never Dies

Black holes are powerful objects in space with gravity so strong that nothing can escape them. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes can slowly lose energy by giving off tiny particles. This process is called Hawking radiation . Over time, the black hole gets smaller and hotter, and in the end, it disappears completely. But new research by Menezes and his team shows something different. Using a theory called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) , they studied black holes with quantum corrections. In their model, the black hole does not vanish completely. Instead, it stops shrinking when it reaches a very small size. This leftover is called a black hole remnant . They also studied something called grey-body factors , which affect how much energy escapes from a black hole. Their findings show that the black hole cools down and stops losing mass once it reaches a minimum mass . This new model removes the idea of a “singularity” at the center of the black hole and gives us a better ...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Planetary Movements Might Explain Sunspot Cycles and Solar Phenomena

Sunspots, dark patches on the Sun's surface, follow a cycle of increasing and decreasing activity every 11 years. For years, scientists have relied on the dynamo model to explain this cycle. According to this model, the Sun's magnetic field is generated by the movement of plasma and the Sun's rotation. However, this model does not fully explain why the sunspot cycle is sometimes unpredictable. Lauri Jetsu, a researcher, has proposed a new approach. Jetsu’s analysis, using a method called the Discrete Chi-square Method (DCM), suggests that planetary movements, especially those of Earth, Jupiter, and Mercury, play a key role in driving the sunspot cycle. His theory focuses on Flux Transfer Events (FTEs), where the magnetic fields of these planets interact with the Sun’s magnetic field. These interactions could create the sunspots and explain other solar phenomena like the Sun’s magnetic polarity reversing every 11 years. The Sun, our closest star, has been a subject of scient...
Post a Comment
Read more