It doesn’t look like the most cutting-edge vehicle. A dinky toy car made out of what looks like Lego Technic creeps in slow jerks across a tabletop—and that’s with the video sped up to twice speed. But this is one of the first examples of an engine powered by an unusual renewable resource: evaporation. In a paper in Nature Communications, researchers at Columbia University and Loyola University Chicago demonstrate a way of harnessing the natural energy of water evaporating and turning it into power to run a rotary-like and piston-like engine and even produce enough electricity through a generator to power LEDs.

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