In January, Treehugger profiled a gym in Detroit that’s available for use by the homeless and has electricity-generating equipment. According to Cass Community Social Services, “The gym will be open daily for homeless people living in the CCSS’s transitional housing and permanent supportive housing programs, as well as staff members and volunteers.” The gym uses [...]

Scientists are getting closer to making fashion that harvests human energy. This article in the Chicago Tribune describes UC-Berkeley professor Luwei Lin’s project to develop nanofibers that can be woven into clothing and generate electricity from the wearer’s smallest movements. These nanofibers, which make use of piezoelectricity, can be washed multiple times and not lose [...]

This post about a homemade bicycle generator begins: “Living in the woods there are no convenient plug sockets.” And yet laptops are still necessary tools. Authors of the blog A Walk Around Britain have created a simple bicycle-powered electrical generator using the same parts as those described in The Human-Powered Home’s plan for a homemade [...]

A new development in passively harvesting human power was featured in a recent NY Times article. Using piezoelectric crystals to generate electricity from human movement isn’t a novel idea. Its varied applications are described in Chapter 1 of The Human-Powered Home. But now scientists at Princeton have printed the crystals onto a flexible rubberlike material [...]

If you’ve read The Human-Powered Home or followed pedal-power technology a while, you probably know about Maya Pedal. This Guatemalan organization is a model for collaborative, innovative human power engineering. Now Maya Pedal has updated its Web site to include easier navigation, more photos, and best of all, detailed plans and drawings of its most [...]