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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Radioisotope based generators do that just fine. They've even been implanted in people. For a while, they were the standard for how to power pacemakers. Then some patients got old and died. It turned out that properly disposing of the pacemaker meant cutting up the dead body. That caused relatives a lot of distress, so we discontinued use of radioactive power supplies for internally implanted devices.
No.
A device like this breaks down glucose, which releases energy. If you couple that energy to building something else in your body, or use it to make electricity as the implant is doing, then that's fine. But breaking glucose to increase your metabolism will just lead to producing so much electricity in the implant that it starts fucking with your nervous system or even stops your heart (which would happen at much lower power levels than you'd think).
There's one more option for dispersing the excess energy you'd get from increasing your metabolism, of course: it could just be used as heat. But increasing your metabolism by simply turning up the thermostat is dangerous, and gets you much too hot very quickly. There's actually a drug called DNP that does just that, but making your mitochondria waste a lot of energy in the production of ATP. While DNP effectively increases your metabolism and was used as a weight loss drug in the 1930's, it also leads to cataracts and cases of lethal hyperthermia (translation: cooking yourself to death from the inside) so it was discontinued. Athletes and body builders still use it to burn fat fast, but it's really dangerous and can't be used on a regular basis.
Animals actually use special fatty tissues, called brown fats, that wastes energy in exactly the way that DNP would force your entire body to waste energy. It appears in babies or on vital areas in cold-weather animals as organic heating pads, and some animals also use it to regulate or recover from hibernation.
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
It doesn't even have to power anything but itself, I wouldn't mind having a few implanted to burn calories and help with weight loss.