Charge iPod with an onion!

Two teenaged boys in Bangalore have come up with a unique innovation that can recharge an iPod with an onion.

The duo – Ajay, 15, and Chandrashekar, 14, students of Poornaprajna Education Academy, Bangalore - demonstrated their discovery at the Young Innovators’ Meet, an exhibition of creative ideas at Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium in Bangalore.

The boys took an onion, drilled a see-through hole with a screw driver and kept the bulbous vegetable dipped in an energy drink, a branded citric juice, for half an hour. Next, they took out the onion, wiped its bottom with a piece of cloth to absorb the moisture and inserted the free end of an iPod’s USB cord to successfully charge the gizmo for 15 minutes.

The voltmeter, which recorded the iPod before and after its insertion into the onion, showed that the gadget could be used for 15 minutes after the exercise. “After keeping the onion dipped in the energy drink for half an hour, the USB cord of iPod should be kept inserted in it for another half an hour. Then, you can listen to the music on the iPod for a full 15 minutes”, Ajay claimed.

Explaining the scientific aspect of the innovation, Ajay told a curious crowd of visitors to the exhibition that the acidic elements of the onion react with the electrolytes in the juice to produce small electric charges. This crude, but handy, method was invented by the two young minds in merely 45 days. “We conducted many experiments and concluded that it worked the best with onions”, Chandrashekar said.

It is not just an iPod, which can be charged with the onion, other gizmos like even the MP3 player can be charged in a similar manner, the budding scientists claimed.