Best science headline of the day:
Yeast-powered fuel cell feeds on human blood
One presumes the blood is contributed voluntarily.
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.
This idea has some ancestry in sf. Our first thoughts might turn to The Matrix (1999) (best use of "coppertop!" as a swear word). But the concept goes further back to Pat Cadigan's Synners (1991). There's probably earlier stuff, too.
All kinds of horror stories could be built upon this. Think about the hard-working hacker, or office temp, whose vitality is slowly, slowly drained away from overwork. Or the victim is parasited to death without ever learning the cause, a la Quiroga's brilliant "The Feather Pillow" (pdf). Or, as with The Matrix, an evil force forces people to power these batteries with their lives.
Gizmodo offers an even more disgusting idea, since these tiny machines have a
major problem with waste products. That waste is created as those particular batteries involve microbial yeast-based fuel cells that steal "some of the electrons produced when the yeast metabolizes glucose" in order to create a small current. While the entire process works just fine, the yeast cells are at risk unless the waste products are removed. We can't exactly let the waste be dumped into the blood stream, so until there's a some kind of cleaning process, the batteries are trouble as they either they die off or poison your bloodstream while trying to survive.
On the fearsome digital media side, how long before someone uses this story as a rhetorical figure for overdependence on technology?
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