A team of researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have built an edible battery. Yum! The battery is made from nothing but non-toxic food-grade materials. These include beeswax, seaweed, cellulose, and activated charcoal, among other things. Once again, yum! It can deliver 48 microamperes of current for more than ten minutes. Yeah, it's tiny, and not all that powerful. But it's edible! Still, it wasn't developed in order to grace a meal. In fact, they are rechargeable, which would be useless if you made them just to be eaten.
These batteries could be very useful for children's and pets' toys, since small batteries are often ingested by those who don't know any better. Conventional batteries accidentally ingested can be quite dangerous. Another use would be in cutting-edge medical therapies, like tiny robots that are swallowed to monitor conditions in the digestive system, or even tinier drug-delivery robots. Another benefit of edible electronic components would be the non-toxic disposal of old batteries in our environment. Along those lines, the team is also working on developing edible transistors. Read about these batteries at ars technica, and marvel at the way we've learned how to harness organic matter for hi-tech solutions. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia)