A Tiny Box That Charges AA Batteries From Electromagnetic Fields

Gadget-charging juice is in the air all around us. Dennis Siegel’s small white boxes harvest it. A piece in the current issue of Mother Jones makes a compelling case that lead, the element, can be traced as the cause of a surge in violent crimes in the '80s and early '90s. Exposure to leaded gasoline and lead-based paints, the theory goes, quietly tweaked the brains of an entire generation, causing lower IQs, hyperactivity, and behavioral issues that later manifested themselves as crime. It’s inconclusive whether lead is indeed the U.S.'s "real criminal element," as the story says, but it does get one thinking about the potential effects of the other myriad invisible forces all around us, like Wi-Fi or cellular signals. Dennis Siegel, a digital media student at the University of the Arts in Bremen, Germany, has harnessed one such force for his most recent project, for a...