• New Scientist, Monday, December 14, 2015 12:02 PM

Stranded without food and water, TV survival specialist Bear Grylls sometimes demonstrates drinking urine as a last resort to stay alive. But it could have other emergency uses – such as powering a device to send a distress signal. That’s the idea behind a pair of socks developed by Ioannis Ieropoulos’s team at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK. Walking in the socks forces a bladder’s worth (roughly 648 millilitres) of urine to circulate through integrated tubes towards microbial fuels cells (MFCs), which contain bacteria that guzzle nutrients and create electricity. In lab experiments, the system produced enough electricity to power a wireless transmitter to send out the message “World’s First Wearable MFC” every two minutes.

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