The material shown in the photo contains piezoelectric nanowires which, when flexed can produce enough power to drive an LCD.

When we first produced our Living Art magazine for Outside (vid below), we envisioned a future where magazines and other media were published and distributed on recyclable, flexible OLED devices which would cost about the same as a hardcopy magazine today. Imagine something about size of a sheet of paper, and the thickness of a laminated menu, that you can purchase on your way to work and use as long as you like. Nanogenerators like this may be the technology that powers such a device.

Our belief is that once portable media is freed from the constrains of the proprietary device like a smartphone or tablet, the barriers to access this media become low enough to make the medium near ubiquitous. So naturally we are excited to see little advancements like this emerge. If you’re looking forward to someday curling up with a flexible digital magazine that you can afford to loose on the train, this is definitely technology to keep your eye on.

“Now researchers at Georgia Tech have made the first nanowire-based generators that can harvest sufficient mechanical energy to power small devices, including light-emitting diodes and a liquid-crystal display.” [Technology Review]