Snail Turned into a Living Battery

With all the buzz talk today about the urge to discover alternative sources of energy, the last thing that comes to my mind are insects. 

I used to think the folks at DARPA only enjoyed looking at this kind of thing, but a team from Clarkson University in New York and BenGurion University in Israel, have gone one better by turning a snail into a power generator. Yes, ladies and gentleman, A SNAIL!!!

To make this possible, a pair of buckypaper electrodes (tough sheets of matter made of carbon nano-tubes that can generate energy) were charged by the electro-chemical reactions in the slow-moving invertebrates "hemolymph," its equivalent to blood.

The main questions that come to mind are, how much energy can this generate? Also, because snails move so slowly I am sure their blood does too, so would this then mean that not much energy can be generated? If so, what is the purpose of this? According to Discovery Magazine, the snail cyborg can only produce about 0.16 micro-watts of continuous power, though it can rise to more than 7 micro-watts for short bursts (your average light bulb consumes 60 watts). Furthermore, engaget.com said that "it is hoped the snails will provide a sustainable way to power listening devices for the Department of Homeland Security." It is said that the snails will be tiny spies for the military that can crawl through rubble in buildings and generate only enough energy to send signals back to their base.

...so if you see a bunch of snails with small attachments on their heads, watch out!

The first time I heard of  insects being used to harvest energy was when I found out researchers at DARPA had attached cybernetic implants onto beetles brains as a way to make a more useful and cost-efficient micro-air vehicles than fully robotic ones.

However, what amazed me the most was that they were able to attached piezoelectric generators to each wing and harvest the energy generated during flying and use it to power the mind-control circuit!!!

So how did all of this cyborg excitement come to be? Surprisingly, it can all be traced back to an experiment in 2003 that involved scientists generating power from a grape. However, unlike the grape, all the living creatures in these studies survived and thrived to tell the tail.
 

© new wave ideas -Sara Bonham