New Scientist explains: For consumer safety, the U.S. Food And Drug Administration specifies that leakage can’t exceed a power density of 5 milliwatts per square centimeter, at around 5 cm from the oven surface. Although a waveguide delivers the microwaves into the food chamber some still escape through the gap around the oven door and through the metal-meshed window. Now, Yoshihiro Kawahara at the University of Tokyo and colleagues have found a way to harness that escaped energy. “The energy accumulated over a two-minute run of the microwave oven was enough to operate some low-power kitchen tools for a few minutes,” Kawahara says. They were able to power a digital cooking timer to count down for 3 minutes and beep for 2.5 seconds. The small harvester could be embedded in most kitchen gadgets. So by leaving gadgets close to the microwave, they would gradually be charged up enough to operate. The work was presented at UbiComp 2013 in Zurich earlier this month. [UbiComp via New Scientist] Image: Geoffrey Fairchild via Flickr This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com
