Cyborg Snails
March 14th, 2012Via: Nature:
The dozen or so brown garden snails crawling around the plastic, moss-filled terrarium in Evgeny Katz’s laboratory look normal, but they have a hidden superpower: they produce electricity.
Into each mollusc, Katz and his team at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, have implanted tiny biofuel cells that extract electrical power from the glucose and oxygen in the snail’s blood. Munching mainly on carrots, the cyborg snails live for around half a year and generate electricity whenever their implanted electrodes are hooked up to an external circuit. “The animals are quite fit — they eat, drink and crawl. We take care to keep them alive and happy,” Katz says.
Self-powered cyborgs
Snails are just one of several living creatures to have been ‘electrified’ like this. Katz’s research, reported last week in the Journal of the American Chemical Society1, comes hot on the heels of a January paper in the same journal from researchers led by Daniel Scherson at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who have implanted biofuel cells into live cockroaches. And in work yet to be published, Sameer Singhal, who directs a team working on biomedical and energy technology at CFD Research Corporation in Huntsville, Alabama, together with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, reports implanting biofuel cells into beetles. The insects survived the process and generated power for more than two weeks, the scientists say.
All of these efforts are aimed at helping to create insect (or snail) cyborgs, a concept that has attracted funding from the US Department of Defense. For at least a decade, researchers have been creating battery-powered microcircuits with sensors and radio antennae and implanting them into various bugs and creepy-crawlies so that the creatures could gather information about their surroundings for environmental monitoring or military purposes.
But batteries might be too bulky and short-lived to power prolonged missions — which is where the idea of tapping into the creatures’ own metabolism comes in. Katz has shown that in snails, biofuel cells could provide a steady dribble of power for months. “The truly impressive portion of [Katz’s] work is that the implantation provides such stable potential for such a long period of time,” says Shelley Minteer, who works on biofuel cells at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Related: DARPA Researchers Rig Cyborg Beetles to Capture Energy That Powers Neuro Control Electronics
