A T-shirt that can charge your phone

BBC : Xiaodong Li and Lihong Bao of the University of South Carolina have come up with a way to turn a cotton T-shirt into a “stable, high-performing supercapacitor"âmdash;a device used to quickly store and release electrical energy. According to their paper in Advanced Materials, they used a chemical annealing process to add a layer of activated carbon to the cotton fibers. By coating the fibers with manganese oxide, they were able to increase the capacitance of the resulting compound and minimize charge–discharge cycle degradation. The shirt could be used to power devices ranging from cell phones to medical sensors.