Obvious Violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

The violation of the second law of thermodynamics referred to below (conversion of ambient heat into electricity, in the absence of temperature gradient) is not obvious, as the setup is relatively complicated and difficult to analyze by the general public. Yet the study is published in a prestigious journal - this, combined with the complete silence surrounding the discovery, suggests that the violation may be real:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.0161
Self-Charged Graphene Battery Harvests Electricity from Thermal Energy of the Environment, Zihan Xu et al: "Moreover, the thermal velocity of ions can be maintained by the external environment, which means it is unlimited. However, little study has been reported on converting the ionic thermal energy into electricity. Here we present a graphene device with asymmetric electrodes configuration to capture such ionic thermal energy and convert it into electricity. [...] To exclude the possibility of chemical reaction, we performed control experiments... [...] In conclusion, we could not find any evidences that support the opinion that the induced voltage came from chemical reaction. The mechanism for electricity generation by graphene in solution is a pure physical process..."

https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.3748
Electricity generated from Ambient Heat by Pencils, Zihan Xu, Guo'an Tai: "The idea of generating electricity from ambient heat has significant meanings for both science and engineering. Here, we present an interesting idea of using pencil leads, which are made of graphite and clay, to generate electricity from the thermal motion of ions in aqueous electrolyte solution at room temperature. When two pencil leads were placed in parallel in the solutions, output power of 0.655, 1.023, 1.023 and 1.828 nW were generated in 3 M KCl, NaCl, NiCl2 and CuCl2 solutions, respectively. Besides, we also demonstrate that two pieces of reduced graphene oxide films and /or few-layer graphene films can generate much more electricity when dipped into the solutions, while there was no electrodes contact with the solution. This finding further verified that the electricity was not resulted from the chemical reaction between the electrodes and the solutions. The results also demonstrate that ambient thermal energy can be harvested with low dimensional materials, such as graphene, or with the surface of solid material without the presence of temperature gradient. However, the mechanism is still unclear."

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip...1063/1.4825269
Electricity generated from ambient heat across a silicon surface, Guoan Tai, Zihan Xu, and Jinsong Liu, Appl. Phys. Lett. 103, 163902 (2013): "We report generation of electricity from the limitless thermal motion of ions across a two-dimensional (2D) silicon (Si) surface at room temperature. [...] ....limitless ambient heat, which is universally present in the form of kinetic energy from molecular, particle, and ion sources, has not yet been reported to generate electricity. [...] This study provides insights into the development of self-charging technologies to harvest energy from ambient heat, and the power output is comparable to several environmental energy harvesting techniques such as ZnO nanogenerator, liquid and gas flow-induced electricity generation across carbon nanotube thin films and graphene, although this remains a challenge to the second law of thermodynamics..."

Pentcho Valev