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An Edible Battery and NASA’s Mars Rover Has Lost Its Companion Stone
🕑 Added 2023-04-26 19:15:01 +0000 UTCAn Edible Battery
A team from the Italian Institute of Technology has created rechargeable batteries from edible components like seaweed, vitamins, and quercetin, the plant pigment found in onions. They glued the pieces together with beeswax and, because it’s a good electric conductor, they sprinkled some gold on the contacts. Yes, gold is edible in the sense that it just passes through (if you know what I mean). The researchers say the batteries may have use for medical applications where you’d rather have a battery that doesn’t contain toxic compounds. Press release here. Paper here.
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India Moves Forward With Gravitational Wave Detector
The Indian government has approved $320 million for the construction of a gravitational wave interferometer, LIGO-India, that will resemble the ones located in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The combined data from many interferometers makes it possible to pin down the positions and distances of the sources to a higher degree of accuracy. LIGO-India is expected to go online by the end of the decade. More here.
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NASA’s Mars Rover Has Lost Its Companion Stone
The Perseverance Rover that roams Mars had accidentally picked up a stone with one of its wheels more than a year ago (left image). Recent images show that the stone is now gone (right image). More here.
Comments
Thanks Tracey for giving me the straight scoop. 🙂
Food-based electrolytes are pretty common (remember the "two-potato clock"?), but food-based electrodes are a real breakthrough. The edible batteries here are pretty big in the picture and it will be a challenge to make them smaller while still maintaining capacity. In order to compete with button cells, the edible batteries will need to get upwards of a volt or several volts and they will need to get into the milliAmp range for enough time to pass through the body part in need of studying. As a proof of concept, these are pretty cool, but it will be a while before they can be viable replacements for existing batteries.
This edible battery is pretty neat, maybe more sophisticated & specialised versions could eventually replace some of the metal button batteries we use hopefully.
