Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University presented their work on batteries powered by non-toxic melanin pigments at the American Chemical Society annual meeting. These batteries do not contain the typical toxic metals found in regular batteries, so they would be safer to use in medical devices that are meant to enter the body.
Besides their role in skin pigment, one of the things melanins are good at is attaching to metals, which is known as metal chelation.
'We thought, if they have this kind of electron exchange capability and this kind of cation chelation capability, then that really is what a battery material is in its essence,' Bettinger said at a press conference. 'We have really leveraged those existing properties in a different context and made this new invention.'
They found that their batteries can deliver 5 to 10 mW of power over a span of about 18 hours, which is optimal for powering ingestible medical devices that take about 20 hours to pass through the body.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Gravis on Wednesday August 31 2016, @03:15AM
if the future of implantable technology wants to actually thrive it will need to be adapted to work with the human body. currently, we are taking computers, scaling them down and shoving them in people. what we should be doing is moving toward chemically driven cellular systems that contain all the things needed to replace themselves in case of damage. effectively, we need to begin engineering biology if we are going to have any hope of improving on our naturally occurring biological systems that we call bodies.