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An edible battery could be a revolutionary product for monitoring the gastrointestinal tract.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Any Italian city, you would imagine, is a gastronomic<\/a> delight — and the Italian port city of Genoa is no less an example of one.<\/p>\n Pesto, the green sauce made from basil, is a Genoese<\/a> original, as is aglioteli, a garlic sauce, and Prescins\u00eaua, which is a type of cheese. The city is also known for a wealth of delicious seafood dishes made from anchovies, octopus and swordfish.<\/p>\n Also:\u00a0<\/strong>Want a compassionate response from a doctor? You may want to ask ChatGPT instead<\/strong><\/p>\n Now, Genoa is also home to the world's first edible battery, which is made from an eclectic array of ingredients such as beeswax and seaweed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n While this battery may not be starring on the menus of the many fine restaurants of Genoa, it may save your life one day — or at the very least an expensive surgery — by simply dissolving into your digestive tract.<\/p>\n The gastrointestinal tract — where your food is pulverized and digested — is one of the most important parts of your body's machinery. Research shows that treating it well has a direct and outsized impact on brain<\/a> health and functioning.<\/p>\n Therefore, any issue in this tract — made up of your colon (large intestine), rectum, small intestine, stomach, esophagus, throat, and mouth — needs to be attended to immediately.<\/p>\n Also: MedPerf aims to speed medical AI while keeping data private<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the scourges<\/a> of this digestive system is colon cancer, a leading killer of middle-aged men and women today. Survival rates hinge on being able to detect it early.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, most examinations of the gastrointestinal region involve sending a thin tube with a camera affixed to the tip either down your throat to the small intestine or through the rectum to the colon, neither of which are pleasant experiences.<\/p>\n However, an innovative, and increasingly attractive — albeit less common — method is to dispatch a camera housed in a small, vitamin pill-shaped capsule along with silver oxide batteries on its maiden voyage down into your gut.\u00a0<\/p>\n Part secret-service spycam, part Jedi starfighter, the pill<\/a>\u00a0— primarily used to inspect the small intestine in a process called capsule endoscopy<\/a>\u00a0— makes its way through the digestive tract while taking pictures at the rate of six a second, dispatching them wirelessly to an electronic belt worn by the patient.\u00a0<\/p>\n Also:\u00a0<\/strong>Should AI come to your doctor's office? OpenAI's co-founder thinks so<\/strong><\/p>\n While this process sounds great so far, there's a problem. Ingestible devices, as amazing as they are, require medical oversight while they're administered and they sometimes get lodged into the mountainous crevices of your innards.\u00a0<\/p>\n Out of nowhere, you've gone from a routine, affordable cancer test to surgery and a humongous medical bill<\/a>.<\/p>\n But what if the pill camera was made of substances that were not harmful and somehow quietly melded away into nothingness once it served its tour of duty?<\/p>\n Italian researchers from Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia<\/a> (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) have engineered a battery that could power devices, such as the pill camera, using ingredients you may find in any food lover's pantry.<\/p>\n For the anode of this battery, the Italian researchers used riboflavin, a crucial substance necessary for cell growth and functioning, and found in a wide variety of food, including lean meats, almonds, and spinach.<\/p>\n Quercetin, a crucial antioxidant found in fruits and vegetables, such as onions, grapes, berries and broccoli, was picked to be the cathode.<\/p>\n Also:\u00a0<\/strong>Google's MedPaLM emphasizes human clinicians in medical AI<\/strong><\/p>\n Activated charcoal, used to treat cases of poisoning, was used to increase electrical conductivity, while a water-based solution acted as the electrolyte.<\/p>\n For the separator, which is commonly used in batteries to prevent short circuits, the researchers used nori or seaweed.<\/p>\n Also: You can send a hug through the internet with this haptic invention<\/strong><\/p>\n Edible gold foil of the kind that you use to bake cakes and pastries was used for the electrodes.<\/p>\n Then, the whole unit was encased in beeswax.<\/p>\n This carefully crafted work of ingenuity is able to operate at 0.65 Volts, low enough to not affect humans when they swallow it, but with enough juice to power a tiny LED for a short while.<\/p>\n The researchers leading this promising, edible battery experiment offer a few caveats: the beeswax-made battery housing is a stellar proof-of-concept, but it needs to be scaled down a little for real-world applications.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n This edible battery is made of beeswax, gold laminate, almonds, activated charcoal, nori algae, ethyl cellulose, and quercetin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Crucially, this edible battery is just one of many emerging solutions that are ushering in an edible revolution in healthcare: an edible pH sensor, a radio frequency filter, an edible pill for intra-body communication — these are all recent advances pushing the envelope of complex, edible electronic systems.<\/p>\n Many of these advances are urgently needed in areas of pharmacology and health diagnostics, where battery-powered devices and sensors could keep tabs on our innards and provide information on food quality.\u00a0<\/p>\n Regular batteries of today, which are made up of toxic substances, will not be able to play that role. Ingestible, non-toxic batteries can also find an important role in children's toys.<\/p>\n Also:\u00a0<\/strong>AI bots have been acing medical school exams, but should they become your doctor?<\/strong><\/p>\n Most importantly, however, these edible batteries offer a path toward a more sustainable future in which almost everything that requires energy will be powered by a clean grid via a battery.\u00a0<\/p>\n Today, the substance that powers clean tech is lithium, and mining it to meet demand causes significant sustainability challenges<\/a>. Only one quarter of the 88 million tons of lithium, embedded deep inside earth's core, is economically viable to mine. Even then, contamination of ground water by heavy metals is a persistent threat. And that's not taking into account huge habitat loss for wildlife and general environmental carnage.<\/p>\n Hence, this small, edible step in sustainable batteries could inspire a larger movement.<\/p>\n “While our edible batteries won't power electric cars, they are proof that batteries can be made from safer materials than current Li-ion batteries. We believe they will inspire other scientists to build safer batteries for a truly sustainable future,” said<\/a> Ivan Ilic, one of the co-authors of the stufy.<\/p>\n The researchers' paper — An Edible Rechargeable Battery<\/em> —\u00a0was recently published<\/a> in the Advanced Materials journal, in which they described their proof-of-concept battery cell.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nGut reaction<\/h2>\n
Edibles for your health<\/h2>\n
Powering ahead<\/h2>\n
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