Comment by perlgeek

Thermodynamics says "no", at least on macroscopic scales.

My thermodynamics lectures are some 20 years in the past, so my memory is a bit rusty, but iirc you need "free energy", that is, usable energy in the form of a low-entropy energy source, which is usually a temperature gradient (but could also be a radiation source or something else).

To get to these results, you have to do statistics of large numbers, so it's theoretically possible to violate this on the nano scale.

The optimist in me hopes that we've found a scalable way to exploit this, the pessimist/skeptic in me says it's another cold fusion moment.