A team of chemical engineers at South Korea’s Yeungnam University recently had an idea to test whether the massive amounts of biowaste from chicken farming could be put to good use.

Maybe there was nothing good on TV that night, or maybe someone was snacking on a 20-piece box of chicken nuggets and had a revelation. In any case, as engineers they did what most engineers love to do — they tried it out to see what would happen. 

Sure enough, they found a way to extract what would ultimately become supercapacitors from the chicken farm's biowaste. It's a long way to go to create something commercially viable as a source of energy, but their proof of concept is all that's needed to launch a new way to bring additional clean energy to our power-hungry devices.