Turn Heat into Electricity

Similarly to the dream of turning lead into gold, notebook designers have dreamed of turning part of the heat released by CPU/GPU and components into electricity. The benefit would then be double, make cooling device more effective while increasing battery lifetime.
Couple of months ago, we learned that Apple was interested by such a technology for turning heat into electricity and developed by Eneco.
Scientists from the University of Utah have developed a new technology, slightly different but achieving the same goal. Instead of converting directly heat into energy, the new process turns into sound and then into electricity. They use a cylinder-shaped "resonators" to turn heat into noise, then piezoelectric devices to turn the sound into electrical current. Overall, the technology could be about 20 to 25% efficient, but could reach higher efficiency for more dedicated or demanding applications.
One should not expect to see such technology integrated into our notebook tomorrow, as one will have to reduce its size, evaluate if its manufacturing cost is worth the benefit. The scientists aim initially to use this technology to improve efficiency of solar cell from 20% to 50% within the next 2 years.