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Three things to know about a sustainable energy breakthrough 

Penn Engineering’s James Pikul explains how a new method of harnessing energy by using water trapped in the air is possible and discusses the implication of the research. 
Photo of lightening striking a city at night.
“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” says Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the paper’s senior author. “Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt—but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.”
(Image: iStock/Matt Grehan)

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