Comments on: Cyborg Snails Generate Electrical Power From Their Blood-like Fluid

By: Christopher

Christopher — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:55:37 +0000

Very interesting article. It is amazing how power can be generated from biological creatures.

By: will

will — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:59:38 +0000

Why not humans? I’d love to be able to burn off a couple of pounds and charge my cell phone with a plug in my arm.

By: Veronique Greenwood

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:32:58 +0000

Yes, fixed!

By: Tomek

Tomek — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:16:01 +0000

The back story of the matrix shows there is a lot more depth to the machine-human interaction. As it generally goes, the robots had an uprising, but were peaceful. Humans tried to the quell them, so the robots established an independent nation. The humans attacked the independent nation, so the robots made a matrix to keep them safe. It is not so much about power generation. More on that at “Matrix Shorts” an animated short series filling in the gaps.

By: IW

IW — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:27:51 +0000

The explanation used in The Matrix referred not to electricity but to BTUs. There would be far fewer BTUs generated from just a head than there would be from a whole body.

Whether Morpheus got the amount right (25,000 BTUs) depends, I suppose on what time period he was referring to for a given body mass and skin area. I understand the ‘average’ emission for adult humans is something in the 350 BTUs/hour range.

But if this is the case, then one is forced to wonder why they used humans (especially given the evident problems associated with them, as Smith enumerates at one point) instead of geothermal energy!

By: Mephane

Mephane — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:25:26 +0000

That really bugged me about The Matrix; sure, humans produce power, but net we’re huge energy sinks, not sources.

The abysmally low efficiency of “humans as power source” is not at the heart of this conundrum. It goes even deeper: technically, all humans are solar-powered, too, only the ways the sun’s light has to go until it can fuel a human body are more convoluted than that of a photovoltaic panel + battery. The way the movies propose this kind of power plant would be a perpetuum mobile – humans produce electricity, die, their bodies are dissolved and the resulting liquid is used to grow more humans, while in reality the fuel is the light from the sun, captured by plants, stored in molecules that are then consumed directly by the humans or indirectly through a food chain of animals.

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 03:05:17 +0000

The article quotes the peak power per snail incorrectly.

The snails generated a peak of 7.45uW, not 7W.
Likewise, the continuous power was .16uW, not .16W.

So, several orders of magnitude less…

By: souhjiro

souhjiro — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 22:29:02 +0000

As said on comment 2, yes, was far better the preproduction idea of The Matrix being a sort of neural net or global computer, using humans as chips, makes more sense the worth and expenses of mantain live and conscious(sorta) millions of human beings…

By: Stephen Daugherty

Stephen Daugherty — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:06:55 +0000

Cyborg Lobster. That sounds like a strange country ballad.

By: Cody

Cody — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:17:47 +0000

That really bugged me about The Matrix; sure, humans produce power, but net we’re huge energy sinks, not sources. It takes a lot of energy to fuel our brains, so even if we assume the robots are just sustaining a fraction of the humans fed by other humans in their rapidly diminishing stockpile, they’d be much more efficient decapitated—plus they’d save all the energy they spent on developing and maintaining the massive simulation required to satiate those brains. In any case it is not a sustainable cycle.