Category: biological fuel cell

It's easy to imagine how tough it would be to put in a mechanical implant of some kind - a defibrillator, or an artificial heart, or even a gadget to squirt medication as needed - that required significant wattage. But I'm surely not the first one to note that basic chemistry is what metabolism uses to get the energy for muscles, and to think it's too bad there isn't some way to similarly extract energy from the fuels and oxidizers floating along in the bloodstream to run medical implants.

Heart pumps and anything remotely like that are still out of reach, but earlier this month in PLoS ONE an MIT team reported progress toward getting a trickle of electricity from the...