This may be one of the best sources of renewable energy we’ve seen yet: lobsters. Not only lobsters, but cyborg lobsters. We are not making this up: that is what scientists at Clarkson University and the University of Vermont College of Medicine call them. The scientists connected two crustaceans to a watch, just as one might a battery, and use them to run the machine, Tech Review reports:
With electrodes in their abdomen, the two lobsters powered the watch for an hour, until the lobsters’ glucose levels near the electrode dropped. (They don’t feel any pain, a member of the team has explained, because they don’t have nerve endings where the electrodes were implanted.) The voltage picked up though, and the crustaceans powered the watch for as long as they remained alive in the lab.
The eventual aim is to create medical implants that will “use the human body as a battery” — in other words, this is just a step on the way to the technology that kept Darth Vader alive for all those years. It all starts with a pacemaker and then, soon enough, underneath your black helmet of doom, you’re more machine than man.
