Urine Battery Turns Pee Into Power
Before you next flush the toilet, consider this: Scientists in Singapore have developed a battery powered by urine. Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology created the credit card-size battery as a disposable power source for medical test kits. Scientists have been scrambling to create smaller, more efficient, and less expensive "biochips" to test for diseases such as diabetes. Until now, however, similarly small batteries to power the devices remained elusive.
Previous efforts all petered out due to piss-poor performance.
Diagnostic test kits commonly analyze the chemical composition of a person's urine to detect a malady. Ki Bang Lee and his colleagues realized that the substance being tested—urine—could also power the test. "In order to address this problem, we have designed a disposable battery on a chip, which is activated by biofluids such as urine," Lee wrote in an e-mail to National Geographic News. The research team describes the battery in the current issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.
Flush with success they vowed not to piss away this opportunity.
Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, said the technology is a welcome innovation in a time of rising energy prices.
No longer will artificially erected barriers cause technology to dribble along.
"All jokes [about] urine aside, what is needed are low-cost batteries. Â…" he said. "The other neat thing about this is the fact that it's basically a biodegradable battery."
Shake three times to activate.