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New Battery Technology Draws Energy Directly From The Human Body (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer:
A team of eleven scientists from UCLA and the University of Connecticut has created a new energy-storing device that can draw electrical power from the human body. What researchers created is a biological supercapacitor, a protein-based battery-like device that extracts energy from the human body and then releases it inside an electrical circuit â" the implantable medical device. According to a research paper published earlier this month, the supercapacitor is made up by a device called a "harvester" that operates by using the body's heat and movements to extract electrical charges from ions found in human body fluids, such as blood, serum, or urine.
As electrodes, the harvester uses a carbon nanomaterial called graphene, layered with modified human proteins. The electrodes collect energy from the human body, relay it to the harvester, which then stores it for later use. Because graphene sheets can be drawn in sheets as thin as a few atoms, this allows for the creation of utra-thin supercapacitors that could be used as alternatives to classic batteries. For example, the bio-friendly supercapacitors researchers created are thinner than a human hair, and are also flexible, moving and twisting with the human body.
As electrodes, the harvester uses a carbon nanomaterial called graphene, layered with modified human proteins. The electrodes collect energy from the human body, relay it to the harvester, which then stores it for later use. Because graphene sheets can be drawn in sheets as thin as a few atoms, this allows for the creation of utra-thin supercapacitors that could be used as alternatives to classic batteries. For example, the bio-friendly supercapacitors researchers created are thinner than a human hair, and are also flexible, moving and twisting with the human body.
There's a movie about that, you know? It doesn't end up well for us.
#DeleteFacebook
I just charged my phone to 100% and it only drained 0.005 years of my life!
A witty
Having to 'take some time to recharge my batteries" might have to be taken literally now.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
First thought after reading it...
now we just need "a form of fusion"
The idea was when people went to concerts, they wore a thin headband which transmitted your electrical energy to the singer who wore a suit with conductive fibers in it. The more excited the crowd was, the more power the singer received.
The ending was the woman singer killing herself with the help of the sound/electrical guy by having the suit overload itself.
Cannot remember the name of the story. It was part of a collection of short stories in a monthly/quarterly book, similar in size to Reader's Digest. This would have been sometime in the 70s.
Insert Matrix joke here....
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I guess semen would be even an more energy rich liquid? Better start stockpiling immediatly!
You need an electric personality to make this new battery work?
And we thought Life Fibers were alien. OK maybe they're technically still alien to Japan, having been invented by Americans. But, clothes that suck your blood are still a bad idea.
Overeat some? Just plug in the Xbox and play a couple of games!
This electrode goes up your ass.. This one goes in your mouth. Oh, wait - I have it backwards.
is eat cheeseburgers while playing Pokemon Go?
It would just drain some of your fat. You know... that biological battery technology used by all animals bigger than a bacteria.
Also, besides being used to reduce fat by the slimmest of margins (Getit?!) it would probably be there to help diagnose various medical issues - perhaps even repair some of them.
Would that extend people's lives? Remains to be seen.
There's always a chance that recording oneself while licking an electric socket might become the new craze as people keep giving up smoking more and more - eliminating any life extending benefits of medical nano-machines.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Seems we have less obvious crapflooders but even more imbecile, juvenile teenage boys nowadays on /.
This is, if it ever is implemented, braves the FDA, etc, a real revolution for medicine. All kinds of stuff like pacemakers, implanted insulin pumps simply need this yesterday.
However it also is the first and most important step to make cyborgs out of humans. All that new cool cyborg tech the Pentagon wants to create its super soldiers needs power to operate and regular surgical procedures simply for changing the battery would really kill that concept immediately.
As always, a dual use technology.
Some folks call it a Graphene; I call it a Flubber.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Everyone keeps talking about devices that turn a small amount of heat into electricity directly. Why not slap a patch of that stuff directly onto someone's skin? Is it that inefficient or low wattage? I mean it'd double as a personal air conditioner basically.
Which can accumulate a lot of energy in a small and confined space. What could possibly go wrong?
Raise your hand if you're interested in having something called "the harvester" implanted in your body.
On the other hand... It would make a good sci-fi horror film. People are implanted with a device made called, "the harvester", made by John Deere (or similar) and are sub-sequentially enslaved by the support contracts because they have no right to repair the devices and removing them is not a survivable option. Oh wait, sounds like a "dark" version of the movie, Repo Men - never mind.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It seems to me that removing ions from the bloodstream will have the same effect on larger scales as drinking large amounts of water. The summary is confusing because at one part it is saying it's using body heat and on the other part it's extracting ions from the fluids.
Using a small stirling-type engine is one thing although I highly doubt you can motivate the body to generate enough heat differentials for the engine without creating a form of inflammation response. Extracting ions from the blood stream is a bit tricky unless we can target very particular ones like sodium in combination with sodium-rich diets (McDonalds every day). It's neat that they can do it, I just think that it's going to be tricky to power up your cell phone without killing yourself.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
From the referenced article: "Compared to batteries, supercapacitors also have faster charge-discharge rates, lower internal resistance, higher power density, better cycling stability, and the ability to use external fluids as electrolytes." Have we ever had a supercapacitor that had higher energy density than a lithium ion battery? Is this some amazing new breakthrough in energy density? If so, man, they really really buried the lead.
www.GeekCrumbs.com
These batteries want to drain my precious bodily fluids, and I'm not going for it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So how many slaves needed to power a house?
So now we can have cybernetic hearts, eye implants, hearing implants and direct brain implants that allow for brains to directly control computers. And now we can power them directly off of the human body. So we either have the Six Million Dollar man or the Borg. I'm not sure which.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Could you lose weight with this?
Borg implants are not powered by the body. Drones plug into an external power source and their implants synthesize nutrients. So Borg do not need to eat.
This is the opposite. You need to eat to fuel your implants.
So society spends all that energy to grow food (tractors for planting, spraying, harvesting, herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, water, shipping, etc) just so that you can eat it and now they want to put something in your body to harvest a minute fraction of the inputs.
It has you
When you say bull,
I'll say shit,
Bull,
Shit,
Bull,
Shit
So they want to extract energy from body heat and charge.
Very little energy can be extracted this way, so they just fix that by considering using a hypothetical graphene battery that can store a lot of energy.
But if we had a way to store a shit ton of energy in a very compact battery, surely we wouldn't need recharging our phones on the go using the human body?
Life depends on those ions. Without them you die. or worse.
a blue pill?
You can extract energy from a human body, but it's so little it is.damn near useless
Better off harnessing the movement, which has been done for decades already in commercial application
... And you thought your Samsung phone battery catching fire was a big deal....
I don't want to be a plane when someone spontaneously combusts because their harvester overloaded.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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I'd be interested if this could just convert the excess fat in my body to power in a battery! ;-)
Apropos super capacitors - one of the problems with capacitors lies in having to keep the opposite charges apart, which is exactly what the membrane surrounding the mitochondria does, and very well. According to this: http://bionumbers.hms.harvard...., the field strength across that membrane is some 30 MV/m (that's Mega-Volt, yes) - IOW, a lot.
https://xkcd.com/566/
It would be really cool if this took energy away from you such that you burn fat.
Powering implanted devices, such as insulin pumps (while we still need them) pacemakers and other monitoring devices. The implantable cellphone/computer becomes another step closer. Perhaps a two-way communication between the brain/body and various technologies, HUD's, visorless VR environments... who knows?
PlaynBass
So, now... can I finally hope that one day I'll be able to charge my cell phone by plugging a cable to my wrist, while at the same time have a large calorie deficit so that I can either eat more or exercise less while maintaining my body weight.
Science is cool
Anger is an energy! :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...