Today's award for best mad science project goes to the team who figured out how to extract electrical power from cockroaches. This appears in an article with the grand title "An Implantable Biofuel Cell for a Live Insect."
Or, as the wondering Ars Techica writer mutters,
science sometimes attracts people who pull the wings off a cockroach, pin it on its back, and stick electrodes inside it to use it as a mini-electricity generator.
And it works!
The specific power densities of the biofuel cell implanted in a female Blaberus discoidalis through incisions into its abdomen yielded maximum values of ca. 55 μW/cm2 at 0.2 V that decreased by only ca. 5% after ca. 2.5 h of operation.
Mad science: providing nightmare fuel science Mary Shelley.
(thanks to Todd Bryant; photo via Wikipedia)
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