MIT creates glucose fuel cell to power implanted brain-computer interfaces | Hacker News Reader

MIT creates glucose fuel cell to power implanted brain-computer interfaces

extremetech.com

72 pointsadeelarshad8243 comments

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Link to the original article:

http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/glucose-fuel-cell-0612.ht...

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

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

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

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.

Type 2 diabetics have the issue where body parts become increasingly "deaf" to insulin. This keeps blood sugar levels higher for longer periods of time.

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...

Check this out http://www.quora.com/Neural-Interfaces/How-did-Stanford-use-...

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

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

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...

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.

Have you ever tasted cerebrospinal fluid? The glucose is definitely there for a reason.

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).

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I agree. Wake up, sheeple!

I believe you are mistaken in both sentences.

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?

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

Could this be scaled up and used for weight loss?

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.

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

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.

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?

That only works if your extra calories come from glucose intake. It wouldn't help for complex carbs, fat, or protein.

Your extra calories always wind up as glucose in your blood sugar.

Not true AFAIRC. Lipids are absorbed as lipids (fatty acids), proteins as amino acids. Aminos can be broken down into sugar, though.

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.

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.

What is the actual chemical reaction going on here?

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

We can have a better handle on what happens inside a given cell than the complex web of cause and effect that happens between populations of different kinds of cells and their environment.

What goes on inside your gut is still more of a mystery than what goes on inside your cells.

Frighteningly well understood. The level of detail in which the electron transport chain is known is astonishing.

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