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SYDNEY, Australia -- Fancy this: clothing that generates solar power,

The sleeve was tested by the Geelong Football Club in preseason training last November, under the supervision of the team's doctor, Hugh Seward, who's also president of the Medical Officers Association of the Australian Football League. Australian football is a quirky, but fast-moving amalgam of soccer, basketball and American football.

Seward says he was highly impressed by the injury-avoiding capabilities of the knee sleeve, which is now undergoing further refinement.

Seward, like Steele, says derivations of the sleeve could help reduce other sports injuries such as elbow problems among tennis players, Achilles' tendon problems among runners and knee injuries among skiers. It could also be used in applications such as teaching better golf swings or ensuring that physical therapy patients exercise correctly.

Other uses could include textiles such as bed sheets that constantly monitor a user's heartbeat, outdoor clothing that change insulation and waterproofing properties in response to temperature and humidity.

But perhaps the most amazing over-the-horizon application of "intelligent polymers" may be those that could one day convert sunlight to electricity, leading to clothing that generates solar power merely by being worn, according to Gordon Wallace, director of the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute in Wollongong (IPRI), south of Sydney.

At present, traditional flat solar panels convert sunlight to electricity at something like 20-percent efficiency. Wallace would be happy if polymer-based clothing could achieve a solar energy conversion efficiency of 1 to 2 percent.

Nonetheless, assuming the technical hurdles could be overcome, this could open the way for energy-generating clothing for soldiers carrying low-power communications and navigation gear -- particularly if other polymers in the clothing can be tweaked to serve as batteries.

Civilian uses could include clothing that powers small electronic devices such as music players, phones or small computers, Wallace said. Rudimentary prototypes in this solar-energy generating/battery-equipped clothing area could be ready within five years, depending on his luck in cracking some of the molecular hurdles involved, said Wallace.

Outside this whiz-bang area, electrically charged polymers are also likely to find applications in more mundane industrial areas. Among the more obscure uses would be electrically charged plastic polymers as rust-inhibiting coatings for metals and polymers that can sense odors and monitor air quality.

"There are a lot of possible areas for application for intelligent polymers," Wallace said. "It's hard to gauge the overall size of the potential market."

Eleksen's fabric has already been incorporated into a recliner as well as a jacket from Spyder Active Sports.

The British-based start-up says the booming growth in consumer electronics has opened the door for commercial exploitation of its invention: fabric that can conduct electricity. The trick is that it doesn't contain wires or metal contacts: The company's five layer Elektex fabric feels and looks sort of like nylon and can be incorporated unobtrusively into windbreakers, carrying cases or key fobs.

"People always look for the wires," said CEO Robin Shephard, fingering the fabric.

On Wednesday, Eleksen announced a deal with outdoor apparel manufacturer O'Neill to incorporate the fabric in its H2 apparel line, which includes a backpack with a built-in solar panel and coat with a control panel for cell phones or MP3 players. The coat will also contain built-in headphones and microphones, so you won't have to take your coat off to speak or listen to music. A built-in Bluetooth module handles communications and also switches feeds from the MP3 player to the phone and vice versa.

Eleksen's fabric has already been incorporated into a recliner as well as a jacket from Spyder Active Sports. The Spyder coat currently costs $3,000, but the products containing the company's fabric will come down in price. One large Asian manufacturer plans to come out with a line of coats with the fabric for the mid-range; the company is also talking to shoe manufacturers.

Overall, incorporating the fabric adds less than $20 to the overall cost, Shephard said. Electric fabrics could become a $500 million market by 2008, according to statistics promoted by the company.

Eleksen is also talking with Taiwanese manufacturers to come out with a $99 fabric keyboard that can be rolled up in a tube as well as other PC peripherals.

Chalk it up to puppets. The underlying technology was developed several years ago by Dan Sandbach and Chris Chapman, two material scientists working on Splitting Image, the puppet show that skewered leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They designed the fabric to give the puppets more natural movements.

"You create resistance wherever you touch it. That will give you a very articulated X, Y and Z (coordinate points)," Shephard said. "As soon as you understand where the fabric is addressed and gets the information to the CPU, that's it."

For the first few years, the company, which counts 3i and Siemens Ventures as investors, chased too many opportunities, Shephard said. In 2004 for instance, Eleksen created 109 prototypes and landed only three deals. This year the number of prototypes will be reduced to between 20 and 30. Sales, however, are finally climbing.

"We will do several million dollars this year as compared to the square root of zero last year," said Shephard, who came to the company last year.

Whether the technology succeeds and where it could go next remains to be seen. O'Neill's first products are designed for winter sports, but the fabric is waterproof so, conceivably, it could be incorporated into wet suits too.

The keyboard in a tube, which will probably go on sale later this year, will be touted at the Computex conference in Taipei next week. The keyboard actually evolved from a project with Logitech, which attached an Eleksen keypad to a handheld it briefly sold.

Once a market gets established for consumer devices like keyboards and coats, Eleksen will then try to get into the medical device market.

"It is completely doable, but it takes a two-year cycle," Shepard said. "You have the investment and legal issues."

Bush: U.S. on Verge of Energy Breakthrough

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 2 minutes ago

MILWAUKEE - Saying the nation is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that would "startle" most Americans,
President Bush on Monday outlined his energy proposals to help wean the country off foreign oil.
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Less than half the crude oil used by refineries is produced in the United States, while 60 percent comes from foreign nations, Bush said during the first stop on a two-day trip to talk about energy.

Some of these foreign suppliers have "unstable" governments that have fundamental differences with America, he said.

"It creates a national security issue and we're held hostage for energy by foreign nations that may not like us," Bush said.

Bush is focusing on energy at a time when Americans are paying high power bills to heat their homes this winter and have only recently seen a decrease in gasoline prices.

One of Bush's proposals would expand research into smaller, longer-lasting batteries for electric-gas hybrid cars, including plug-ins. He highlighted that initiative with a visit Monday to the battery center at Milwaukee-based auto-parts supplier Johnson Controls Inc.

During his trip, Bush is also focusing on a proposal to increase investment in development of clean electric power sources, and proposals to speed the development of biofuels such as "cellulosic" ethanol made from wood chips or sawgrass.