Fabric power (Image: Image/Flickr/Getty)

FED up with your MP3 player running out of juice? Maybe your shirt could help. A newly developed carbon-nanotube-based ink that can soak into fabrics could turn clothing into wearable batteries.

Yi Cui and colleagues at Stanford University in California created the ink, made with single-walled carbon nanotubes. The team dyed porous fabrics with the ink to create a conductive textile with very low resistance. The fabric maintained performance after repeated washes, suggesting that the ink is durable (Nano Letters, DOI: 10.1021/nl903949m).

Cui says it’s possible to treat the dyed material with an electrolyte to create a fabric capacitor capable of …