A few months ago (has it really been that long?) I posted the story about the Australians kicking off a new initiative for a power-scavenging shirt at CSIRO (that post can be found here). In that post a mentioned (and linked to) a group of guys who are working at the nanoscale to achieve the energy harvesting. And while it was certainly impressive, they were only able to scavenge at ultrasonic harmonics (not mechanical) -- well guess what? They've now developed a methodology to grow the scavenging nanowires on the surface or polymeric fibers and can harvest mechanical energy. 
The group's homepage can be found here, I would suggest reading through the previous papers first to get a sense of how they've progressed over the past few months.
The group's homepage can be found here, I would suggest reading through the previous papers first to get a sense of how they've progressed over the past few months. They estimate that with this fibers integrated into a yarn, a square meter could yield roughly 80 mW -- granted this is assuming A LOT (the ability to make enough of this fiber affordably, the ability to make a yarn, and an interconnect scheme with low loss!) however it at least gives some vague parameters for developers on the other end to pull this through as it develops. Of course, the usual applications are mentioned: ipod shirt, biomedical applications, etc...but I feel like there are much cooler applications that can be explored, what do you think?
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