Yeast-powered fuel cell feeds on human blood «Imporantant»

Yeast-powered fuel cell feeds on human blood «Imporantant»

www.newscientist.com

* 12:47 01 April 2009 by Kurt Kleiner
* For similar stories, visit the Energy and Fuels Topic Guide

Yeast cells feeding on the glucose in human blood might one day power implants such as pacemakers. A living source of power that is able to regenerate itself would eliminate the need for regular operations to replace batteries.

Now that prospect is a step nearer. A team at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, has created tiny microbial fuel cells by encapsulating yeast cells in a flexible capsule. They went on to show the fuel cells can generate power from a drop of human blood plasma.

Such fuel cells would be especially useful for devices, such as intraspinal microelectrodes for treating paralysis, which need to be implanted in places where replacing a battery is tricky, says Mu Chiao, who co-authored the paper with Chin-Pang-Billy Siu, also at UBC.

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
www.newscientist.com
www.newscientist.com
en.wikipedia.org
www.aimglobal.org

Absolutely fascinating
A battery that feeds on blood. Quite a marvel, soon doctors will no longer have to replace batteries in pacemakers and so on. But is it really a good thing? Will this science push microchip implanting to the next level?

With technology like this implants would no longer need to rely on short range RFID (Radio frequency identification) to activate them, A fuel cell like this would give the implant the ability to transmit the signal to the cell tower. That is a scary thought! Current implant chips rely on the RFID signal to power up the chip no the chip transmitting on it's own power. This could be very bad, the implications are limitless. The implant could track everything down to your hartbeat everywhere all of the time.

www.newscientist.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

OOPS misspelled important LOL

Originally posted by The_Tick
OOPS misspelled important LOL

Heheh, still a rather swank discovery, nonetheless. S+F for a thread that matters.

Well, now machines will be able to exploit our bodies for energy once AI really starts to manifest human or greater intelligence. Great, we gave them a head start. There is no spoon.

reply to post by EnlightenUp


Words off of my fingers. The first thing I thought when I read the title is "So we're using people to generate our energy now?".

this shows we really can do anything

especially fix the energy problem

but its a bit scary

feeding on blood to produce energy

almost makes me think of some type of zombie like thing or something


could be a great thing for us, hopefully it is developed as a usefull tool, not a weapon or anything along those lines

Isn't the whole idea of life about the same thing?
Controlled energy usage?
What are genes for?

Are we trying to recreate what has already been created millions of years ago?

Or destroy it?

Or worse: pervert it

I was thinking more along the lines of The Matrix. Everybody's middle name will be "coppertop".

Hmmm...applications - implant our prison population, prisons become generating stations. Once you prove out a large scale application like that you have the first link between today, tomorrow, and The Matrix for real (well, without the machine overlords). Elites in control, chipped slaves serving them, and everyone else in a tube generating all the clean energy they need.