Bacteria microgenerators?
Cool little story here — Wired.com reports on a 16-year-old Montreal student who figured out how to use a certain type of bacteria to generate electricity for a science competition. The bacteria in question is naturally magnetic, and he arranged them in a way that got them spinning and generating a tiny amount of electricity for more than 48 hours.
Beats the Van der Graaf generator I build in 1983 in Grade 8 – got enough of a static charge to burn holes in my knuckes!

Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.