Slashdot Mirror
Electrical Power From Humans
Coisiche writes "The BBC covers a team of scientists who are working on a new way to power medical implants: an internal biofuel cell. From the article: 'Their gadget, called a biofuel cell, uses glucose and oxygen at concentrations found in the body to generate electricity. They are the first group in the world to demonstrate their device working while implanted in a living animal. If all goes to plan, within a decade or two, biofuel cells may be used to power a range of medical implants, from sensors and drug delivery devices to entire artificial organs. All you'll need to do to power them up is eat a candy bar, or drink a coke. ... In 2010, they tested their fuel cell in a rat for 40 days and reported that it worked flawlessly, producing a steady electrical current throughout, with no noticeable side effects on the rat's behavior or physiology.' Of course, there's never been a sci-fi movie using such technology as a plot device..."
I'm pretty sure the Matrix is going to read this paper and keep it on file for later, after it's world domination plan is complete.
Next we build the machines that will one day make use of our technology to turn ourselves into batteries. On the upside, they will create the best online world ever ...
How much power is generated by the system? What is the efficiency? If science writers aren't going to include this kind of information in their articles, they could at least include a reference to the original paper for those of us who are interested.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Of course, there's never been a sci-fi movie using such technology as a plot device...
Very nice.
devices which do the opposite: convert power into biologically useful energy. after that, resistance is futile.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
If I just collected it and ran a generator,...
World domination! Or a tidy lawn at least.
This can also be used to regulate blood sugar levels--a cure for obesity that allows people to still be lazy and eat a lot.
Next, a USB port in your belly button to charge your iPhone.
turn up the resistance, burn more calories.
perfect dieting tool.
Just turn on the gadget and watch the pounds melt away (assuming you don't go into a coma from hypoglycemia first).
Speaking of which, while the ability to run off the body's own power sources is great, it does pose a bit of a risk...
I, for one, look forward to quitting my job and simply setting myself on top of an inductive charging couch, watching TV, and eating as much fattening food as possible to sell my bio-power back to the grid. I aspire to one day becoming something like a defecating tree.
As interesting as this is, I wouldn't be surprised if we produce batteries before long that can store enough power for a lifetime.
Might be cheaper and easier to use a next-generation battery than a bio-generator.
Perhaps more reliable too.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Uses blood glucose(BG) and oxygen to run? Fine.
What about diabetics, particularly those who are prone to sudden blood sugar drops? Or get sick and need all their energy to survive.
I can see adding a sensor to shut it down if the BG drops below, say 80, BUT
1. Add a secure, remotely-controlled STFU switch for medical emergencies
and
2. Do NOT use it at all for life-critical medical add-ons.
Is agent Smith behind this?
It seems like the usage of your body's energy is a feature, not just a cost. Would it be possible to have some device use as much energy from your body as possible so as to keep you from getting fat? And for a triple-play, how about if that energy could also be stored or transmitted for consumer use, displacing some of your expenditures on electricity?
Obviously, by that point the logistics would be a major issue, but it would be awesome if something could tackle the problems of implant powering, obesity, and energy all at once.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Drink a Coke huh? Not in America. We use High Fructose Corn Syrup for most soft drinks. You want to power that baby, you'll need a Coke from Mexico. They actually use real sugar.
I'll just use it to burn up those extra calories.
In Mother Russia battery charges off of you!
.01/kwh of human output is NOT a productive activity.
I can't imagine the electric companies will pay you enough to compensate for your time. $0.03/kwh for some
As far as battery technologies, the most recent well used technology is Li-ion. and that was developed by Exxon in the 1970's, so I don't see much hope for a "new battery tech" to change anything.
One step closer to real life being the same as Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I never asked for this.
I'd love an implant which would passively monitor my vitals, blood fat etc. levels and allow uploading through some kind of NFC solution. 10-20 years?
.: Max Romantschuk
Add an outlet to it, and you'll be able to charge your ipod and lose a pound at the same time!
With the right chili, you could power New York City for a night.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
So this technology can basicly eradicate obesity and powershortage at the same time?
I for one welcome our smoking-hot-blondes-who-turn-into-agents overlords. *takes vow of celebacy*
Would it be possible for this to work as way to increase the body's effective metabolism? Thereby allowing some folks with slow metabolisms to boost theirs?
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
Could I graft a port on my hand somewhere so I could use this thing to power my cell phone while talking on it?
Or maybe....
Go go Gadget flashlight! :)
Oblig xkcd.
In the plus side, cellphone like devices will be even more obiquitous. In the minus side, a tinfoil hat won't be enough anymore, you could get implanted tracking devices for the rest of your life, that not just tell where you are.
This is a little scary. At the best of times their pathway will involve creating highly dangerous hydrogen peroxide as a primary product. Other normal biological processes make peroxide, too, but it's still scary shit. When you put hydrogen peroxide on a cut in your hand that bubbling your hear is the sound of the peroxide eating through the contents of every damaged cell in the place.
There's also the creation of superoxide radicals, singlet oxygen, etc. to consider. Any enzyme that binds oxygen or catalyzes oxygen-related reactions generates some of these free radicals here and there; it's just the way life works. Hemoglobin does it in blood cells, cytochrome oxidase does it in mitochondria while making bio-energy the old-fashioned way, and the glucose oxidase used in this fuel cell does it. And those free radicals can go through your DNA like a wood chipper through an IKEA end table.
Ultimately this story is a little ague, and the studies they describe aren't nearly long enough to have any idea whether the rate of free radical production is too high. The rat survived for 40 days, but we want to put this into people and let it work for 40 years.
And don't forget that glucose contains 100 times more energy than cells normally work with directly: living cells put glucose through dozens of intermediate chemical reactions, each harvesting just a bit of energy, to transform its 686 kilocalories per mole into a cellular energy source containing a safe, usable 7.3 kilocalories per mole. I'm not saying they don't know what they're doing, but using glucose for anything in living cells is like dismantling an artillery shell into a pile of fire starters. It's ridiculously complicated, and the biological mechanisms for doing it have been very, very highly conserved by evolution for billions of years, meaning there's one way to get it right and about a trillion ways (literally) to get it wrong. Starting with an existing enzyme lessens most of those concerns, but it's still a dangerous process and easy to fuck up.
Anyway, I'm not trying to piss on their parade or play the armchair academic here; I think this is great and I'm sure they know what they're doing. I just thought you'd be interested to know where the concerns are and why this is such an ambitious project.
I am interested in what kind of loss of glucose it is on a per hour basis. It could have big impacts on patients that have insulin dependent diabetes. So for instance if you had an internal insulin pump that was powered by these type of bio fuel cells I have to wonder how it would change the insulin needed. This along with the potential to make a person need to eat more just to keep things powered inside of themselves. Small problems but still things that would be interesting to find out about.
Or you can embed it in your skull!
Just clone a large number of animal stomachs [and whatever other components (or the whole animal)] (human ones will bring up all kinds of legal issues) put them in a building somewhere and setup machinery to feed them and take away to crap. There are probably animals that specialize in eating something we have lots of extra or could get easily to feed them.
Wala energy out of any in a wide variety of bio sources. Just setup near a places that generate the bio output and wala.
Not sure on the scale of power such devices could produce, but I'm sure someone else can fill in the details which will determine if this is stupid or not.
I like sona belt with electric switch and used to loss my belly fat. This is a sky shop product, very effective. Swapan http://beautycarebd.weebly.com/
In Soviet Russia....well, you know how it goes.
How will this work with bonking? The body shuts down to preserve glucose levels for the brain as a critical function. Endurance athletes are familiar with this when they "bonk" or "hit the wall". It's the body's response to preserve brain function. If a device continues to use glucose that's not shot down on low glucose levels, that could cause some not-so-desirable side effects...
"Finally, the whole package is wrapped in a mesh that protects the electrodes from the body's immune system, while still allowing the free flow of glucose and oxygen to the electrodes. The whole package is then implanted in the rat."
That's really cool, if true. The chemistry for something like this has been around for a long time. The problem has been that the body tends to cover these devices in tissue or other material. (It's been a long time, and I don't remember the details.) If they have a way to keep the device clean for years (forever, really) then this will work. But, if tissue or other material builds up on it, and then falls off in chunks and enters the bloodstream it's going to block arteries causing heart attacks and/or strokes and eventually killing the host. One modified rat does not a breakthrough make.
Dick Cheney already has a heart assistance pump that wirelessly phones home - but requires an external battery pack and pump to keep running.
The hacker fun here is to get its number and put it on an auto-dialer in Romania for heart-to-heart romantic chats.
If memory serves me right, in Matrix the energy was generated off bioelectricity and body heat. Here, instead, is a biofuel cell powered by sugar and oxygen. That's like comparing a solar power cell to an internal combustion engine. Now what this invention does replicate is a parasitic organism, or, if the cell actually does something useful, a symbiotic organism.
I think Linux isn't better than Windows hence in the slashdot realm I'm a troll
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Excess sugar in the blood can be damaging, the kidneys end up being damaged from over-work trying to excrete the excess sugar. Hmm, the possibilities.
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
Eat a taco, recharge your smart phone from the caloric content.... sound's like a win win to me (jk)
to get my own USB plug.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
All you'll need to do to power them up is eat a candy bar, or drink a coke... sounds familiar.
Get one that can do the same using body fat, and you're on.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
ever see the Matrix?
Get out of your basements!
This is totally the first step for bio-augmentations Deus Ex style!
1971: http://www.springerlink.com/content/v6654g6683t420p7/ "Parametric study of the anode of an implantable biological fuel cell" which cites related papers as far back as 1968.
sugar?
As others are mentioning, sugar is bad for you. The insulin blast ages your pancreas, whacks-out your cholesterol ratios, and eats at your blood vessel walls.
When they invent an engine that converts fat to energy, they'll have something. Oh wait, they already have.
They didn't tap energy like that in the Matrix.
However, this is almost exactly how the augs are powered in Deus Ex!
I'm not sure if it could be used for weight loss however, as it uses glucose in the blood - It doesn't somehow magically convert fat and glycogen into more blood glucose, so unless the body can compensate by producing glucagon there is a danger it could cause hypoglycemia...
It'd be great for diabetics tho'!
If it works as advertised, enough of them could be used to regulate blood sugar AND subsidize AEP. After all, the US *is* the fattest nation.
Of course, there's never been a sci-fi movie using such technology as a plot device...
Au contraire, the alien healing device in Babylon 5 sounds kinda close.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
insufficient power to weaponize implants?
Expect deja vu (aura vu) as the matrix removes this posting.
Check your premises.
If consumption of food and generting power through these biocells is more efficient and cheaper than burning fossil fuels, then clean energy will be here, NOW, and these will become very important in our world. Pollution will then be measured in CO2 from breathing and sulfur, varions carbon molecules, and other products measured in farts per hour.
If not, then fossil fuels will stay big, but these biocells will largely be relegated to convenience uses.
God, I hope it's the former. Imagine a giant farm of rats who we feed industrial waste and harvest their electricity to power our homes. Then when they die we just feed them to more power-generating electro-rats.
A Glucose BioFuel Cell Implanted in Rats
Cinquin P, Gondran C, Giroud F, Mazabrard S, Pellissier A, et al. (2010) A Glucose BioFuel Cell Implanted in Rats. PLoS ONE 5(5): e10476. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010476
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010476
I'm surprised, slashdot, that nobody has mentioned that this is one of the elements in The Matrix.
Prosthetic devices, say cochlear implants and pacemakers to start with, then the extremities and later still whole limbs once they manage to scale up the fuel cell.
Even the current state of the art in prosthetic limbs strikes me as pretty crude considering what we are capable of manufacturing these days. I can easily envision a prosthetic arm that stays permanently attached. You have the implanted fuel cell to provide the low constant power source needed for the sensory feedback and micro-controller systems, perhaps with a super capacitor to give minimal operation when the main battery pack is off in it's charger. I imagine an amputee would love to be able to put on their glasses, turn on a reading light or hook up the battery pack unassisted when they get up in the morning. (putting your watch on your left wrist when your right hand is turned off strikes me as...challenging.)
Ideally a fuel cell would power the entire limb, but that is obviously a ways off yet, but even allowing an amputee minimal function independent of wall outlets for recharging, or giving them a lower level of fall back power when the battery runs down would be pretty damn popular I'm sure. If we could get enough efficiency out of the the motors and actuators, it may be possible to use a fuel cell that isn't quite enough to run the arm on it's own, but since it is continuous, could feed a super cap that actually powers the thing when it's actually being moved and used. You have all night to output the fuel cell current to a trickle charge set up and a large portion of the day as well.
Anyone here have a powered prosthetic arm or hand?
Or they need us to solve captchas.
They really could have done well if they're taken the approach the we have different, complimentary ways of thinking, so the machines need us the same way we still need computers.
-Morpheus points to a giant blackboard covered in math. ... do you know if she's pretty?
Morpheus: This equation describes an image. Do you know what that image is of?
Neo: No.
Morpheus: Even the computers of the 20th century could do this in a fraction of a second.
-Hologram of the girl in red appears.
Morpheus: Now
Neo: Well, yeah. It's obvious.
Morpheus: Not to a machine. It could take minutes for a machine just to figure out if it had seen her earlier today. By the time it figures out that she's a woman, that she's attractive, and that she smiled at it earlier, you'd already have her phone number.
Neo: Wait, so they need us?
Morpheus: As much as we need them. You would never think this -gestures at the virtual world around them- is something a human being is doing without the help of a machine. And you shouldn't think that the Agent that's after you is on his own either. He borrows the thoughts of people in the matrix to help predict what you'll do next, to know how to intimidate you, to know how to pry information out of you. The dry humor, the need to gloat - that's not the way a machine works, that's how his flesh and blood tools work.
Neo: So the matrix...
Morpheus: Is how they train us, get us to be their intuition and creativity, and above all so we can teach them to make better machines. This isn't about survival - we're too much more capable as a team. It's about which side ends up in the driver's seat for the rest of time, and what gets put away when it isn't being used.
Humans have been known to produce natural gas for millenia
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
To heck with diabetes treatments and charging USB devices in my ear -- I want the "electric eel" version of this -- "Don't mess with me Jaco, or I'll shake your hand!" -- or -- "Watch out, this index finger is set on stun."
Damn, I want to be a walking, talking, Tazer.
And.... I'm also thinking of pick-up lines that would be appropriate were the current routed.... elsewhere...
But you do realize that the *current* generation of tech inside pacemakers manages to last a bit longer than one year, right?
Fat will power my electric eel prosthesis--in turn powering my defense perimeter AND allow me to be propel myself at FTL speeds. BWA HA HAA HAAAAAA!