

MIT creates glucose fuel cell to power implanted brain-computer interfaces - adeelarshad82
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130923-mit-creates-glucose-fuel-cell-to-power-implanted-brain-computer-interfaces

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runako
Link to the original article:

[http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/glucose-fuel-
cell-0612.ht...](http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/glucose-fuel-
cell-0612.html)

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hermannj314
Forget a brain implant. Can a device that lives on glucose help me lose
weight?

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rogerbinns
Or even just manage blood sugar levels. It would be an immense help to the
folks with type 2 diabetes.

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sp332
There are already small devices that regulate insulin levels. How would this
improve on those?

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natrius
Insulin causes blood sugar to be deposited as fat. A fuel cell causes blood
sugar to be turned into electricity, and eventually some combination of work
and heat, which could be far more desirable than fat.

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cdooh
Anyone else read this title and think "Finally they've figured a way to let us
have hard drives connected to our brains" or was it just me?:-D The technology
is certainly interesting...

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slurgfest
Funny that you would say this just as I am dealing with the fallout of a
failing drive...

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cdooh
Good luck with that!! What tools are you using to retrieve the data? Or is it
all gone?

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slurgfest
For the most part I have backups, configs are largely in git etc. However,
some old work is gone since the drive itself is hardly functioning and I'm not
paying for professional data recovery.

So if you get a hard drive installed in your head, make sure you have the same
stuff backed up in git... and make friends with a cyber-dolphin...

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4rgento
I think the glucose present in the cerebrospinal fluid is there for a reason.
Probably not to power implants.

PS: I'm not a doctor.

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mindcruzer
Actually, I'm not sure it is. Not for an energy related reason anyway. I'd
wager the main reason the the glucose is present is due to osmolarity when the
CSF is being created from the blood. Also realize that the CSF has a high
turnover rate, something like 3-4 times per day, so that glucose is being
replenished readily. I doubt this chip uses much glucose in comparison (plus,
they've probably thought of this).

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carbocation
Usually glucose is transported, as it doesn't freely pass through membranes. I
believe the same is true for the glucose in the csf.

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mindcruzer
Yup, my point was that the glucose may be moved into the CSF in order to favor
the movement of water in that direction.

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jostmey
These researchers are helping to remove one of the big problems with BMI chips
- the wire protruding out of the head.

But these BMI chips still suffer from one other major problem. Over the course
of a few months to a few years, scar tissue will start to grow around the
chips. This tissue not only interferes with the electrodes on the chip, but
also endangers the living tissue around the chip. The chips eventually have to
be removed.

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debacle
That's not necessarily true, depending on how the chips are implanted. We've
been putting chunks of metal into people for 80 years and have gotten pretty
good at it.

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smoyer
I keep thinking "You will be assimilated" ... and it's simultaneously a scary
idea and strangely desirable.

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stcredzero
_I keep thinking "You will be assimilated"_

You're using the future tense. Sorry, but it's already happened.

 _and it's simultaneously a scary idea and strangely desirable._

Again, lots of precedent, and it's historical precedent.

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TheSOB88
I agree. Wake up, sheeple!

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stcredzero
I believe you are mistaken in both sentences.

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dcreemer
This is very interesting -- my son uses cochlear implants, which currently use
external batteries and induction to provide power to the internal components.
I wonder if there is enough power available to enable fully implantable
hearing?

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tomp
Wow... My immediate idea is exactly the oposite from the one proposed in the
article:

Have robots that can "live" by eating "food"! Imagine a robot, say a "spider"
or a "mouse", that roams around a city, collecting food (and has a form of a
"stomach", similar to say the one that cows have, where there are bacteria,
dissolving food and producing glucose), and it can use that glucose to
generate electricity, indefinitely... An interesting idea!

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TheSOB88
Bacteria actually do a lot of the digestion in a human as well.

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MBlume
My first thought was "Does this mean if I want a BCI, I'll have to start
eating sugar again?"

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sp332
Your body uses glucose as fuel. You can generate it from other kinds of fuel
sources, but unless you're in a diabetic coma, I guarantee your body has
plenty of glucose in it.

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Scaevolus
Very little if you're on a ketogenic diet, which is often used for hard-to-
treat epilepsy.

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MBlume
This -- on a good day my brain's running mostly on ketones

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tocomment
Could this be scaled up and used for weight loss?

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daeken
By what mechanism? Capturing and stripping the glucose before it's digested
naturally? Seems a bit roundabout since the weight we want to lose (primarily
fat) is really just an energy store in the body in the first place.

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debacle
An artificial means of controlling blood sugar would alleviate the insulin
cycle and prevent the body from storing blood sugar as fat.

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runhomequick
Or you could just quit eating so much sugar and other carbohydrates and do the
same thing.

There is no actual need for dietary carbohydrates.

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boboblong
Why don't you quit reading Hacker News? There's no need for it. In fact,
there's no need for using the Internet at all. Hell, why are you even on a
computer? All you really need is a warm fur coat and a hatchet. What are you,
some kind of hedonist?

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mrose
Very interesting... Only a few short years ago this entire article would have
been science fiction.

From the article: "The platinum acts as a catalyst, stripping electrons from
glucose molecules, similar to how aerobic animal cells (such as our own) strip
electrons from glucose with enzymes and oxygen."

I wonder, and am curious to learn more about, how much of this process is
really understood by modern science.

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shiven
Quite well understood actually.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_respiration>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_transport_chain>

One of the fundamental biochemical pathways and required reading for entry
level life-sciences degree programs.

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lucaspiller
What is the actual chemical reaction going on here?

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carbocation
Reduction of one molecule; oxidation of another. The long version comprises
textbooks, but that is the short version.

