PhysOrg: Discovery Captures, Converts Heat

PhysOrg: Discovery Captures, Converts Heat: "Your car's engine loses 70 percent of its energy as waste heat-but Australian and Oregon scientists may have figured out an efficient way not only to recover that lost energy, but to at long last capture the power-producing potential of geothermal heat.
The trick is to convert it to electricity-and a promising way to accomplish this, the researchers have discovered, involves using extremely thin nanowires to potentially more than double the efficiency of thermoelectric materials."