Human Blood For Electrical Power

burner writes "A Japanese research team has developed a fuel cell that runs on blood without using toxic substances, opening the way for use in artificial hearts and other organs. The biological fuel cell uses glucose with a non-toxic substance used to draw electrons from glucose. So where should I have my laptop power port installed?"

Comments

Re:So that's how they did it.

[spikesahead]

If I recall correctly, I think Morpheus went on about how the human nervous system produced enough electricity to power a light bulb, and that the machines tapped into that energy to run themselves.

Personally, though, I think it would have been cooler if the machines were using us as inexpensive processing units. What if, in the real world, you didn't actually have to sleep, and that 'sleep' is the machines using you to think? o.o

Weight Loss?

[DaHat]

I know the poster was joking about the port... but such a concept is interesting, not for its laptop powering abilities... but for health and weight loss potential.

Why go to the gym to work out and burn calories from when you can plug a small cord into your mid section that would enable the device to draw energy directly from your system... and when your blood was running low... fat stores would naturally be tapped.

Result? Losing weight while reading /.

Re:Some kind of limit?

[Rangerk8]

Hypoglycemia would indeed be a concern. However, the possibilities are intriguing for Type 2 diabetics, who are usually insulin resistant and have way too much glucose in their blood. If a fuel cell can use up that extra glucose, they might actually be able to make a device that would monitor, record, and lower the blood glucose level to normal or thereabouts. Imagine, diabetics could actually wind up producing more power than they use...

Re:Some kind of limit?

[ashridah]

The electrons don't just vanish.
If they did, the energy released would probably turn us into miniature suns the moment we turned one of these on.

It's more likely that the now unstable glucose molecules will break down into carbon dioxide and urea, consuming some oxygen in the process, much like it does when consumed by a normal cell. One presumes the spent potential from the electrons will result in the electrons returning to the blood stream.

And yeah, pushing this too hard would probably fairly easily kill the user, (read, a laptop at 60-100Watts? i doubt it. maybe a trickle charger for the battery :) ).
A well controlled system could easily result in an acceptable increase in energy consumption, which would result in weight loss, without actually exercising (also, not a good thing, since the muscles aren't going to develop, but the fat will be consumed, leaving the user with no way to keep warm). One presumes that anyone using a device like this would be on a strict high-glucose intake diet.

of course, this is conjecture, i've only done basic biology and chemistry :)

Andrew

glucose monitor

[bodrell]

I've got mod points today, but so far no one has said much of interest on this topic. The best use of this device would be monitors for blood sugar levels, to be transmitted to an insulin pump. Having an implanted glucose monitor would remove all the guesswork from insulin administration.

Note: I'm not saying that the device would lower glucose levels by consuming glucose, but since it is powered by sugar, the current should be proportional to the amount of sugar. If blood sugar is high, the implant's signal is high, and the pump delivers more insulin. No real logic required. That's why it's such a good fit. And they say so in the article:

The newly developed cell in the size of a tiny coin is able to generate 0,2 milliwatts of electricity, enough to power a device that measures blood sugar level and transmits data elsewhere, the group said.

Re:glucose monitor

[smallfries]

I was wondering about doing it the other way round. What if it could scale up to something that could reduce the glucose levels in the blood? This would be a type of cure for diabetes - both monitoring the blood sugar levels and then reducing them when they get too high. Keeping the glucose level in the right band isn't a complete fix but it would prevent any collapse or coma.

My first thought was shame hypoglycemics won't be able to use it, but then if it is only generating 0.2mw its hard to say just how much glucose it will use. Probably not much.