This fabric may one day charge your smartphone while it is resting in your pocket

Thanks to a new kind of fabric that is currently in development, smartphones and other electronic gadgets may one day charge whilst resting inside our pockets. Witchcraft, you say? Not really. You see, the secret lies in the threads that the said fabric is to be made out of - a special type of yarn that can conduct electricity. Once contact between it and a compatible electronic device is established, its battery will automatically start charging.

The tricky part is that clothing made out of this conductive textile will have to be equipped with a battery of their own, which is where the juice for the devices being charged will actually come from. But hey, instead of charging a handful of individual gizmos overnight, it would be easier to just plug in your jeans overnight, don't you think?

Of course, such technology is not likely to become commercially available anytime soon, but it is currently being tested for use in the U.K. military. Instead of having a multitude of cables running down their uniforms providing power to their equipment, British soldiers will have no pesky wires dangling off their uniforms. However, the conductive textile still needs to be made weather-proof before it can be used in real-life scenarios.

source: BBC via Gizmodo