Scientists create a rechargeable battery made entirely of food!

Scientists continue to make progress in electronics that can safely monitor and manipulate our health from within the body. Unfortunately, operating these mini medical tools is not always easy. 

But now there's a new type of rechargeable battery that can help in that department. It comes made of edible material and can safely dissolve in the stomach once you have done what you need to do.

The prototype device shown in a new study operates at a harmless 0.65 volt and delivers a current of 48 microamps for 12 minutes - well within the range needed to give small electronic devices a power source.

“Potential future uses range from edible circuits and sensors that can monitor sanitary conditions to powering sensors to monitor food storage conditions,” says senior author Mario Caironi, a molecular electronics researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology. Moreover, given the level of safety of these batteries, they could Use in children's toys, as there is a high risk of ingestion.

Designed from a diverse list of ingredients, it is the first functional rechargeable battery that can be served as a snack. Its components include the vitamin riboflavin for the battery's anode ("negative" end), and quercetin supplements as the cathode ("positive" end). The electrolyte (which generates the electric charge) is made of a water-based solution, and the separator (which prevents short circuits) is made of nori paper, which is the name for the seaweed you find in sushi restaurants.

Activated charcoal, which is often used to treat poisonings, is included to increase electrical conductivity, while the external contacts that transmit electricity to another device are made of beeswax, connected with decorative food-grade gold.

The battery maintains its charge well over dozens of cycles, although it needs to be outside the body to be recharged. The prototype created here is about a square centimeter (0.155 square inch) in size, but the team is already working to make it smaller.

"In fact, we are already developing devices with a larger capacity while reducing the overall size. These developments will also be tested in the future for the operation of soft edible robots," says Caironi.

And if you've ever had a camera or other interconnected device inside you, you'll know that these scans, while crucial to detecting disease, aren't the most comfortable experiences. And this is one area where this edible battery can help.

The devices can be used to check that food is safe and compliant while it is already in the gut, before the monitor is digested with the food.

All of this is still a long way off, but the researchers behind the prototype hope their work will lead to further developments in this field, with the use of larger batteries for energy storage and electric cars, for example.

"While our edible batteries do not power electric cars, they are evidence that batteries can be made of safer materials than current Li-ion batteries," says one of the study's co-authors, Evan Elec, a sustainable energy storage scientist from the Italian Institute of Technology. We believe it will inspire other scientists to design safer batteries for a truly sustainable future."

Research published in Advanced Materials.

Saudi chemists devise a way to produce "green" rubber

Scientists said that ethyl alcohol can be used as a raw material in the rubber industry.

Saudi and European chemists have developed a catalyst that allows the production of butadiene, one of the main reagents for rubber production, using ordinary ethyl alcohol as a catalyst. This discovery will enable specialists to produce "green" rubber. The scientists have published their study in the journal Nature Catalysis. This was reported by the press service at King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz University.

"Most of the butadiene materials currently produced are a by-product of the petrochemical industry, and as a result the volumes of this material available to us are very limited. We have developed a technology that allows us to obtain random quantities of butadiene," said researcher at King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz University, Jung Sang. using the reaction of Lebedev and carbon dioxide alcohols.

Polymers have become a major structural material. Its popularity is due to the fact that the mechanical and physical properties of structures made from this material can be easily altered by changing the structure or the conditions for the synthesis of this material. Thanks to this, the same raw material can be used to manufacture flexible rubber bands and highly durable plastic structures.

And since the main raw materials for the production of rubber and other polymers are now various forms of natural gas and oil, containing short molecules of unsaturated hydrocarbons used in the manufacture of plastics and other polymer products, high prices for hydrocarbon raw materials and limited reserves are forcing scientists to search for new ways to obtain on raw materials in order to produce polymers.

John Sango and his colleagues demonstrated that butadiene, as one of the main raw materials for the production of synthetic rubber, could be obtained using a catalyst they had made through a reaction discovered by the Russian-Soviet chemist, Sergei Lebedev, in 1928. Lebedev had then discovered that ordinary ethyl alcohol could be converted to butadiene by By heating a mixture of alcohol with hydrogen and water to a temperature of 400-500 °C and passing it through a metal oxide.

This technology was used in the Soviet Union and in many other countries of the world to produce butadiene in the middle of the twentieth century, but it was later replaced by more efficient and cheaper technologies for extracting this hydrocarbon from oil. Chemists in Saudi Arabia and Europe have found that the efficiency of the Lebedev reaction can be greatly increased and made more competitive by using a technology to prepare a catalyst based on silicon and magnesium oxides.

This allowed the scientists to develop a technology that, in theory, will help in the near future to produce catalysts consisting of magnesium and silicon for the synthesis of butadiene, producing small amounts of ethylene and other by-products. The researchers concluded that this would allow the establishment of "green" (environmentally friendly) institutions that produce polymers and at the same time be able to compete with the classic technologies that are not environmentally friendly.