In the 1950s, physicist Léon Brillouin published a landmark paper refuting the idea that adding a single diode, a one-way electrical gate, to a circuit is the solution to harvesting energy from Brownian motion. Knowing this, Thibado’s group built their circuit with two diodes for converting AC into a direct current (DC).

So, they built a full-wave rectifier (albeit with only 2 instead of, say, 4 diodes)? Pretty neat to see electrical engineering fundamentals at work.

(also, for any who wanted specifics: article is at https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.0... ; abstract contains a couple of circuit diagrams)

edit: updated link, thanks for pointing that out