June 15, 2016 • 37 mins
Making supercapacitors out of the same stuff you'd buy for a barbecue seems strange, but edible electronics could change the medical industry for the better. Tune in to learn how (and what they'll taste like).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, Ay, and welcome to Forward Thinking, to the
podcast that looks at the future and says and then
you're in the Man from Mars and you go out
at nine cars. I'm Joe McCormick and I'm Lauren volc
(00:24):
Obaum and our usual host Jonathan Strickland is not with
us today. He is somewhere. He's in Scotland getting his
acts sharpened. I'm not sure whether that's a metaphor or not,
but I'm willing to go with it quite literal. Not
the mystical I was hoping not the mister mistical acts
because the mystical acts is made of plastic, so if
(00:45):
he was having someone sharpen it, that would probably go
poorly for everyone involved. No, I think he's actually getting
a full suit of male armor made. I would I
would like that. I would appreciate. Oh, man, imagine if
you were that in the studio. It would make so
many interest noises. Yeah, the shuffling, Yeah, it's great, it
would be soothing. Yeah. Do you remember the time on
(01:07):
this podcast. I'm pretty sure it was on this podcast
in the past that we talked about crazy ants crazy.
I very dimly remember that. I honestly don't remember what
we recorded yesterday. There was some time when we were talking,
I know about crazy ants that are these ants that
are sort of known for getting into like you find
them inside your TV. Yeah, yeah, I remember reading all
(01:29):
of these weird news stories about this a few months
or maybe about a year back, when just these giant
populations of ants were taking over people's electronics and so
and so. The immediate assumption is, like, the ants are
eating my television. Why were they eating the TV? I
don't know if they were actually eating the electronics, but
(01:50):
they were at least attracted to the electronics or yeah, yeah,
they were swarming inside electronics because you know, a they're
they're nice dark places where they can nest and uh
and like something about the electrical current I think it was,
was was attractive to them and and then you would
find yeah, yeah, and then you would find a lot
of dead ones in there, because you know, they would
get zapped by the electrical current and just fill up
(02:11):
the whole space with their bodies. That's pretty cool. Well,
I wonder if those crazy ants that supposedly like to
eat electronics were onto something because there has been a
wave of interesting news in the technology world about edible electronics.
But not like, not like edible electronics, like you're eating
(02:33):
them for sustenance. I mean, right, surely not, because I mean, really,
it sounds like a kind of stupid idea to eat
any electronics, right, I mean, they're expensive, more expensive than food. Usually,
they're they're crunchy in ways that you don't want your
food to be. They probably don't taste all that good
to begin with. But let me give you a scenario
(02:54):
in which you may in fact decide that you want
to eat some electronics. I'll lay out the options for you. Okay,
let's say that, give me the menu. Yeah, you're you're
going in for checkout with your doctor, and your doctor
she looks over and she says, you know, just to
be safe, I'm going to need to take a look
at the inside of your lower g I tract and
(03:16):
inspect the inner lining of your colon for polyps and cancer. Okay.
I can see many situations in which I would want
to make sure I don't have cancer in my lower
gas ro intestinal tract, right, And the obvious way of
going about this is something you may very well be
familiar with. Its tube endoscopy. We're also known as the colonoscopy.
(03:36):
You're probably familiar with this procedure. It's a tube, it's
got a camera on it. It's inserted into the colon, yeah,
fed up along the lower tract of your intestine, and
allows the doctor to take a look around. And yes,
a procedure like this could save your life, So if
it's recommended by your doctor, it's worth getting. Probably go
along with what they say to do totally, despite any
(03:59):
perceived discomfort and embarrassment. But what if you had another
option other than the tube. Let's say that your doctor says, okay,
you can get the tube, or you can just take
a pill. And it works like this. You swallow a
clear plastic capsule containing a camera and an LED, and
(04:21):
this ingested imaging device can travel through your entire gi tract,
taking thousands of pictures as it goes along, and then
transmitting those pictures wirelessly to a receiver device worn on
the outside of the body. Now, the crazy thing is
this actually exists, and it's known as capsule indoscopy. For
(04:42):
many patients, it is obviously a much less troubling proposition
than tube in discopy. Well, and it's also a hypothetically
an outpatient treatment. When you go in for a colonoscopy,
you have to like get an I V and get
knocked out and spend you know, twenty four hours beforehand preparing.
Although I had imagine that that you would also have
to prepare for this kind of situation too. Yeah, somewhat,
(05:04):
but it is obviously lower investment on your party. Not
having to put someone under anesthesia is always preferable. Yeah,
So I'm not sure how much such a procedure stacks
up against the imaging power of a traditional colonoscopy today.
I found one study back from two thousand nine, so
you know, that's like seven years ago now, crazy, Uh
that that showed It showed back then traditional colonoscopy was
(05:29):
more sensitive. So if your doctor recommends you go with
the two, best to do as they say. But let's
say we just imagine a scenario where these su procedures
are the same cost, equally effective, and you can get
equally good imaging from either one. Who wouldn't go with
the pill. Most people would go with the pill, right,
(05:49):
So having a good capsule contained camera that can take
pictures inside the body is one thing. Um, but as
far as I'm aware, existing endoscopic capsule cameras are not
meant to actually be digested. They're meant to pass all
the way through you. Uh, and then once they go
outside the digestive system intact there you know you, yeah,
(06:11):
you Typically you don't have to recover them. They'll transmit
images to some kind of receiver and then you don't
have to go phish it out. But if one word,
to get stuck or damaged inside you, that would be
a bad thing. You might need some surgery to get
it removed. So these little pill machines might be considered
only semi edible. Sure, and and and right, you really
(06:35):
don't want that capsule breaking open because most of the
things that electronics are made of, and I kind of
meant to mention this earlier, aren't good for you. Oh yeah,
we'll talk about that in a minute. Yeah. But what
if you could eat tiny electronic machines that could do
work inside of you and then even potentially be digested
and absorbed without causing any harm to your body. This
(06:58):
is the subject of today's episode. Yes, edible electronics. Edible electronics,
So as weird as this sounds, it probably also sounds
fairly futuristic, but it's not an entirely new concept. This
isn't something that just showed up in the past few years.
Oh yeah, and and every time that the that the
science news media reports on it, it's like brand new,
but it's not. Um, well, okay, totally edible electronics don't
(07:22):
exist yet, but the underlying research into them has been
going on since at the very least, is the first
that the earliest paper that I could find from an
albeit brief search into uh ingestible electronics, which is kind
of the precursor here. That's like that the capsule endoscope endoscopy, endoscopy,
(07:44):
endoscopy endoscopy. Great words it is, I love words. UM
paper was a study of how the body reacts when
weights are lifted in different ways, and uh in a
swallowed sensor was measure pressure happening inside the abdomen during
the study. So interesting, um I've seen I've seen other
(08:06):
Science News site. The nineteen seventies is the beginning of
this kind of research, so it's a possibility that's been
going on for longer than that, but definitely ingustable biosign
trackers have been used in labs since nineteen uh and
and ingustable biosign trackers have been commercially available since that
is when a temperature sensor hit the market, which is
(08:29):
useful for getting accurate readings on a subject's core body
temperature when the subject is, you know, doing stuff and
not available to sit around with a thermometer in their mouth. Also,
thermometers in the mouth are not necessarily the most accurate
version of getting a subject's core body temperature, which can
come in very handy when you're trying to do something like, say,
(08:49):
prevent the injury of an athlete or an astronaut from
heat exhaustion and a heat stroke. The technology was actually
developed by the Johns Hopkins You Diversity Applied Physics Lab
and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center with with the specific
goal of putting these capsules and astronauts when they go
out on spacewalks and make sure that they're not overheating
(09:11):
in their space suits. Okay, that's interesting, Yeah, it makes sense.
So that does sound like a like a highly specialized
usage there, absolutely and even in the case of of
competitive athletes, making sure that those that those people are
not getting heat strokes as well is specialized. Many of us,
I understand, are not competitive athletes. I know I'm not.
(09:34):
Does competitive eating count? Are you competitive about eating? Have
you entered eating competitions? I do enter a kind of
like frenzied state whenever I'm made to eat at my
desk at work, because I'm afraid everybody can hear me chewing,
and I just want to get it over with as
fast as possible. I'm afraid that I I A. I
(09:55):
sit next to Joe in the office. You guys, and
uh and I've never heard you chew, so your relatively
what have you heard meet to electronics because that can
get you. Oh yeah, that's much crunch here. Okay, So
this kind of work has only been the beginning. Yeah,
uh there, there's been a huge body of this kind
of research, and we wanted to talk specifically about the
work of one Christopher Bettinger, who has done just a
(10:17):
lot of really great thought and writing about this. Yeah,
he showed up on on this topic recently. So he's
a Carnegie Melon professor, Christopher Beninger, and he's he's worked
with the idea of edible electronics for a while now.
So he imagines, for instance, a sensor that you could
swallow that would be able to monitor the state of
your gut by looking at the state of your microbiome
(10:40):
or checking for signs of g I problems like Crohn's
disease or or bacterial infections in the gut, Or like
you could take a pill that includes a machine that
would monitor your uptake of an ingested medication and track
how the drug is being absorbed by the body, or
for example, like a pill that contains a measure the
drug payload and then monitors conditions or placement inside your
(11:04):
body to selectively release specific amounts of medication based on
based on information, not just a dumb dose, but a
smart dose. Right, And hey, you know why stop at
swallowing electronics in order to improve healthcare outcomes. Motorola has
spoken to the makers of an ingestible electronic pill about
(11:25):
creating something that serves as an authenticator, So like, you
don't need to remember a pass code anymore or carry
around a ring of keys, because electronics around you, like
your phone or your laptop of your car would all
know who you are because of this electronic pill that
you ate. Oh, I think we've talked about this on
the show before, because I remembered us talking about the
(11:47):
cybersecurity of your personal waste, right, like, like, if there
was a pill authentication form, could somebody use your poop
to log in as you? They probably we could. That's
a nice thought. But anyway, going on with the with
the Bettinger's work, So so all those ideas, I just
(12:08):
said that that makes sense that that'd be a cool
thing to have, But hold your equines. Now, most electronics,
as we hinted at earlier, contain materials that would not
be very friendly to the inside of your body, especially
components like batteries, which often contain chemicals that are just
intrinsically toxic. You don't want to menu. And if one
(12:29):
of these toxic batteries get stuck in your GI tract
and does not pass through, this is a problem. Is
the same thing we were talking about with the camera
capsule earlier, Like it's fine if it just passes through
as normal. If it were to get stuck or something
that would be bad, you might need surgery. But this
is why so people in this field have been looking
towards ideas of using digestible or biodegradable materials to make
(12:54):
these edible electronics out of like making the electronics themselves
inherently endly to your body. So Bettinger authored a review
in a issue of Trends in Biotechnology called Materials Advances
for Next Generation Ingestible Electronic Medical Devices. And in this
review he sort of he points out a problem with
(13:15):
many existing electronic devices meant to go inside the body.
How do electronic implants get inside of you? While they
get in through invasive surgeries, which is always something we
should be trying to avoid if possible surgery comes with
a cost and a small risk to the patient. But
once these things are inside the body, then they have
to operate in what Beninger calls challenging micro environments. No
(13:38):
joke will be the body, Yeah, I mean, essentially, the
human body doesn't want stuff that isn't itself inside of itself. Yeah,
generally not so then, of course, once they're in there,
they can tend to cause bacterial infections and inflammation at
the implant site. And so advances in materials and strategies
for fabricating electronic devices to go inside the body could
(14:01):
help us avoid some of these problems. And ultimately he's
focused on finding new strategies for creating quote packaging, circuit design,
and onboard power supplies that are benign, non toxic, and
even biodegradable. These also on like great ideas, but are
there are there like category, can we break this down
(14:24):
a little bit like like is there are are there
pathways we can take in order to get there? Yeah?
He identifies sort of three major trends. One is miniaturization,
So that is sort of self explanatory, but it's a
trend toward devices and device components that are smaller but
also use less power. And that's important because power once
(14:45):
you get into extreme miniaturization of technology. Uh, as we've
seen on the show plenty of times, power is very
often a concern. So you've got like little tiny robots
that you want to you know, make into some kind
of swarm that will that will go inside people and
control their mind or whatever. We're usually researching, uh these things.
(15:05):
One of the big problems with them is how do
they talk to each other? And how do they how
do they move? But yeah, where does their power come from?
Batteries are not the easiest part. Another trend he identifies
is quote bioresorbable electronics, and that's this main thing towards
UH increased knowledge about how to make electronics components out
(15:28):
of materials that are transient and biodegradable rather than toxic
and indigestible like most batteries and things like that are.
And speaking of batteries, bio batteries is the last big trend.
He identifies non toxic biological materials that can serve as
energy storage, and this is one of the keys to
ingestable electronics. So let's go back to imagining these these
(15:51):
devices that you could swallow. So here's one that might
follow from Bettinger's ideas. The actual logic circuits in this
electronic device are made out of silicon contained in some
sort of biodegradable envelope. Silicon's not gonna hurt you. Other
components such as antennae or do we just say antenna's
(16:13):
now when we're talking about electronics rather than insects, I
think we might like idiots. Yeah, okay, I'm sorry, and
tenna's apologize on behalf of the language. Components like antenna's,
they're made out of benign, relatively non toxic materials like
maybe copper or magnesium, things that are technically essential nutrients
in your body, and that could certainly be be worked
(16:34):
into an electronic component in doses under the daily recommended value. Right,
you're already consuming them. They're already in you. As long
as you don't eat a just huge amount of them,
they're fine. So batteries again are one of the biggest questions.
But Beninger has been working on this problem, and as
of last year, I read news that his team had
(16:55):
built a battery with an anode made out of manganese oxide,
which is a normal, safe mineral found in the body.
Another one of those, and a cathode made out of melanin,
which is another thing naturally found in the body. It's
a natural pigment, so you find it in hair and
skin and your eyeballs. Yeah, exactly. And in many cases
the liquids inside the body, such as gastric fluid itself,
(17:17):
can be perfectly able to function as the electrolyte solution
through which current flows between the cathode and the Anna.
Oh oh, that's exciting. So it's it's like an open
battery system that sounds either exciting or bad. I'm I
think it's pretty cool, Okay, alright, cool, excellent. I'm worried
I'm I'm picturing I'm picturing what is probably not the
(17:41):
scientific case of just of just your whole stomach, like
like zapping you continually until the battery runs down. Well,
fortunately these batteries are not capable of that much power,
and it seems like they're going to be capable of
only a little bit of power, just enough to make
it work. Right. Ah, yeah, that that's right. I did
read a figure in which the battery, this type of
battery provided five milliwotts of power for for up to
(18:04):
twenty hours. And and that twenty hour kind of figure
is a good goal post that they're looking for, because
that's about as long as it takes for something to
move from your mouth out through your other end. So
so that's that's a good hallmark of how long a
battery like this should should last for an endoscopic camera. Um,
and it's it could probably, I'm not sure. I'm not
(18:24):
sure if it could quite power an endoscopic camera. Yet
it's certainly not enough to like power your smartphone. I
really love reading the work that Bedinger has been been
doing about all of this. It's it's really forward thinking.
I feel like we should have some kind of sound
cue whenever we mentioned the show's title in the episode.
But UM's, yeah, it's it's it's really it's really interesting,
(18:45):
um and and looking towards the future, but but also
absolutely describing a lot of what's already going on, Like
there's so many laboratory studies that I ran across while
we were doing this research that are using these principles
in order to to make stuff that people can swallow
for laboratory studies. It's it's it's great. And I and
I had no idea that any of this was going
(19:07):
on before we went into this. I love I love
it when I am surprised by all of the science
going on in our world. It's strange. Yeah, you'd think
you'd hear about people eating electronics, you would, You just don't. Huh, Well,
I got another one. Is pretty weird about this? How
about eating origami robots or what? Okay, okay, I can
(19:29):
I can start. It sounds laughable at first, but then
you think or Agby is nice and folded up and
and sometimes sharp corners pokey the inside of me. Right,
No that's not no, that's not the point. Um no,
but it could probably unfold and do stuff in your body. Yeahah, exactly.
So we we've talked about the research of m I
T computer scientists Dan yellow Russ on the show before. Yeah,
(19:52):
and she she's known for these robots or her group
has been doing some really interesting investigation of the concept
of edible electronic technology. So for a while now, Ruce
and her people have been working on these things, these
origami robots, shape shifting robots that can assemble themselves and
assume different morphologies when subjected to a stimulus. For example,
(20:14):
you have a flat piece of plastic or layered material
that you produced by three D printing or laser cutting,
and then when that material is subjected to some kind
of stimulus, say it's baked at a certain temperature, or
connected to batteries or submerged in water or something like that,
it will naturally fold into programmed shapes and configurations. Sometimes
(20:37):
it can even fold itself in a way that causes movement,
like the oregomy robot can bend itself in such a
way that it crawls or swims. Well, yeah, and this
is totally we We did an episode a long time
ago about for D printing, and this is the idea
behind all of that. Yeah, yeah, similar ideas definitely, Uh,
So how does it do this? Well? How? How how
(20:57):
would you have something that crawls just by bending? Uh?
Like several of Rus's robots, this robot has several layers
of material. So it has a middle layer of material
that shrinks or expands in response to temperature, and then
scoring on the outer layers of the material determines what
shapes the material bends into when the middle layer shrinks.
(21:20):
But so in so so, how does this come into
entering the body? Why would you put one of these
in your mouth? Well? In the most recent research, scientists
from this m I T Group and the University of
Sheffield and Tokyo Tech teamed up to test an origami
robot meant for the inside of the body in a
simulated esophagus and stomach. So one of the challenges here
(21:42):
is being able to make this bending, gut swimming robot
out of bio safe materials. Right in the end, uh
they used this biodegradable plastic film for the shrinking middle layer,
and that is known as bio lephon, and then that's
the part that contracts and empowers the movement, and then
the structural material, the outer material was made out of
(22:04):
dehydrated pig intestine a k a. The natural casing in
your sausage. Yeah yeah, that sounds really gross right up
until you think about how delicious sausages are and you
know that crispy coating on the outside natural pig intestine,
that's right. Oh yeah, so it's one of my favorite things.
On your charcuterie board. There may be a robot, especially
(22:26):
prepared by your chef for you for your stomach purposes.
But what would it do? Why would you want a
biodegradable origami robot crawling around inside your body made of
dehydrated pin intestine partially? Yeah. So let's say you accidentally
swallow a watch battery like you do sometimes. Maybe stuff happens,
(22:47):
cut your bowl of peanuts right next to your bowl
of batteries, and you can't take your eyes off the
season finale of The Bachelor. Oh my god, what are
they gonna say next? And so you accidentally tossed down
a fistful of toxic battery discs. This is something, this
is something that's happened in your house before. Yeah. No,
I can't say that that I've ever watched The Bachelor.
(23:07):
I have eaten batteries and sometimes, uh it's crazy, but
apparently I've read that this happens around thirty times a
year in the United States. I think primarily in young
children who don't know better than to not eat batteries.
Is candy pretty much? Sure, I mean they're shiny. Uh
(23:27):
So here I have no choice but to read a
truly sublime quote from the m I T News feature
on this research quote chu Hey, And this is one
of the researchers. Shouy bought a piece of ham, and
he put the battery on the ham. Ruce says, within
half an hour, the battery was fully submerged in the ham. Submerged,
(23:51):
submerged in the ham. So that made me realize that, yes,
this is important. If you have a battery in your body,
you really wanted out as soon as possible. That's Danielle
Rous speaking. Submerged in the hand, submerged in the ham,
and she is one correct that has convinced me and
(24:11):
emerged in the ham. Get that out of me. If
it can do that to ham, think about what it's
going to do to my squishy inside exactly. This is
a reflection of the fact that swallowed batteries or other
dangerous objects can burn into the walls of the stomach
and there hilarious. It's not funny, it's very tragic. Well,
(24:32):
you need to have some way of getting this thing
out of the body. You've got to be able to
get in and remove it. And so here's where the
origami robot comes in. Okay, how does the origami robot
save the day? So you swallow a capsule and in
the research, this is just a piece of ice with
the robot folded up and frozen and side so it's
like a piece of ice capsule. It might be a
different kind of thing if you were to actually have
(24:52):
something like this in a hospital. But you swallow it,
the capsule opens up inside your stomach and then releases
the tiny robot, and then the tiny robot can use
its bending motion to move around inside the body. Now
somebody on the outside then uses controlled magnetic fields to
direct the motion of the robot, and then the robot
(25:12):
moves to the foreign object, maybe the battery that submerged
in the ham inside your stomach, and then it attaches
to the battery, lifts it out of the tissue where
it's become embedded, and then from there the robot and
the foreign object can be safely passed on through the
digestive system. I can't believe that we've gotten this far
in the episode so far without mentioning um Martin Short
(25:34):
and the amazing film Inner Space. You know, I think
I've actually never seen that, though I've talked about it
on the podcast before. Yeah, I think I there used
to be a ride at Epcot Center that had something
to do with all of this. There was one going
Inside the Body movie that was serious, and then I
think one that was a comedy. Right. I think the
one I'm talking about was the comedy. I don't think
(25:56):
Martin Short does that many serious films that could be wrong.
I and checked up on him in a while. I'm
gonna feel really bad if he's dead. I'm not sure. No,
he's doing great. Oh oh okay, I'm I'm very much relieved. Okay, Well, hey,
how any other edible electronics you want to tell me about, Lauren. Yes,
one bit of research that we saw that, the bit
that inspired this episode to begin with, actually is about
(26:18):
a truly edible electronic component, like digestible, like made out
of food, so not just something that can be digested
and it's fine. It's something that is meant to be digested,
that is mostly entirely meant to be digested. Yes, okay.
So in May of twenty sixteen, a team out of
Arizona State University published a paper in the journal Advanced
(26:39):
Materials Technologies about their lab testing of a super capacitor
made out of food products. Super Capacitors are a type
of like short term energy storage that can be used
to deliver little jolts of power. Um, it's it's it's
a battery type component. It's not as powerful as a
battery would be, but it's good in certain situations that
(27:00):
you don't want to send a battery into necessarily. And
uh yeah, the team the team used a simulated human
stomach to uh to test these devices in and they
managed to successfully zap and kill some E. Coli bacteria.
Pretty cool, and also to power and LED and also
to power and endoscopic camera, so that was pretty cool
(27:25):
for about three minutes. After three minutes, the device was
digested by the artificial gastric fluid. But so how did
they do it? Good question? What was their recipe? Was
it anything like the ones we've seen already? No? Uh no,
Pagan testines at all. Uh well, okay, they experimented with
a bunch of different food stuffs. Pagan testines may have
(27:47):
been involved, but they settled on a sandwich kind of thing. Okay.
So it was a combination of gelatine and cheddar cheese
as a protective casing. Um. Some the electrodes were made
out of devated charcoal, which is a stuff that's available
in dietary supplements. People take those those anti hangover pills.
People take something like that. Uh So yeah, I activated
(28:09):
charcoal bound with egg whites and then dried where the
electrode layers. This sounds like Body Builder. The electrodes were
separated by a sheet of seaweed which was soaked in
the electro light, which was gatorade or a Bonster energy drink. Um. So,
so ions from the liquid electrolyte could flow through the
(28:30):
sheet of seaweed because she seaweed is you know, permeable, uh,
therefore creating a current. But the seaweed is solid enough
to prevent the electrodes from making contact with each other.
And then sheets of gold leaf, which are used as
decoration and high end pastry and sometimes an Indian food,
served as the current. Collectors to make the whole thing viable.
(28:52):
So so they built these devices up like a like
like teeny little lasagnia ravioli is kind of the little
little sandwiches. Um, moving from the outside to the center.
It was gelatin sheet, cheddar cheese, gold leaf egg and
charcoal stuff electric like soaked seaweed, and then out again
in the opposite order, a little sandwich and the whole thing.
(29:16):
Each of the devices, uh is a little square, like
a little bit larger than the size of a soy
sauce packet. And according to the studies principal investigator hen
King Jong, it tastes like cheese. What kind of cheese
cheddar cheese? Yeah? I mean and actually actually the straight
the straight quote from Arizona State University from from its
(29:39):
press release about this whole thing is even better than
just to taste like cheese. The quote is asked what
the combination tastes like, Jong replied, it is cheese. It
is cheese. I thought I thought you'd like that in
particular too. Um. But but if you're worried that this
(30:01):
isn't like weird enough, worry not. They experimented with all
kinds of other strange ingredients when coming up with this recipe.
A few small examples MSG barbecue sauce, jello, and gummy candies.
Boy ah, in that same I'm going to object to.
So you've listed a lot of foods talking about this,
(30:22):
and I don't know if I consider all of them
fully edible. You've named Monster Energy drinks. Uh, gummy candy?
Is MSG a food? It's a food additive product. It's
made of salt, It's made of a lot of solid accent.
Is that accent stuff that used to be in people's grandparents? Oh,
(30:44):
I have I have no idea. I don't think i've
heard of that. I missed the accent days. I remember
thinking it was just pure MSG. It could be wrong.
It's a possibility. And n SG is real tasty. I
don't get headaches from it. I consider myself very lucky.
In that press release, Jong also said that he had
a hard time getting the university to reimburse his lab
(31:04):
receipts at first, because they like just they were like,
you're just out there throwing parties. We're not going to
reimburse your party receipts for all this barbecue sauce and
Monster Energy Drink and seaweed sheets. If those are the
things that anyone is using to throw a party. By
the way, Arizona State University, I don't just give it
(31:24):
to of them like they're they're honestly not living on
a lot. So the chemistry, yeah, yeah, all of that aside.
They they're continuing their research. They hope to improve the
gelatine casing in order to make future iterations of these
devices last longer in the digestive tract than three minutes.
(31:45):
Longer than three minutes would be pretty pretty useful. They
also want to make it smaller by using a three
D printer to do the manufacturing work rather than making
them by hand. And furthermore, they're they're working on a
wireless charging system that would let them re charge the
device or you know, assuming that the device lasted longer
than three minutes, remotely while the device is inside a
(32:07):
human body HM. Which is one of the cool things
about super capacitors. You can you can recharge them and
have them release that charge many much multiple times more
easily than many rechargeable batteries. Yeah. Cool, pretty cool. This
is quite strange. It is, and and it's terrific because
(32:27):
it's it's kind of got a handle on that battery
leg of the of the research stool that we're working. Oh,
I'm just not Maybe I shouldn't use the word stool
when we're already making lots of metaphors about colo. That's
a good one stool because if you know, stool is
three legged, one wobble and nice and stable. And there
(32:50):
were there were two other legs which I am mostly
forgetting about. And it it suggests a platform on which
future research can be built. Absolutely, yeah, And you know, Okay,
so I think that actually this this battery concept, like
making a traditional anode cathode battery out of food, might
be a little bit more complicated. But but supercapacitors are
are great in this because they're they're really quite simple
(33:12):
devices relatively speaking, that only need to do like basic
chemical work. So they're pretty good candidates for being made
out of edible stuff because edible stuff does chemical work. Anyway. Now,
I'm sure there are a lot of other components in
the electronics that you can make out of stuff that
won't hurt you, but you probably can't make out of
(33:34):
like food, food, actual food. Yeah, Like you're not going
to like get like some popcorn and like turn it
into a circuit. Probably, I don't know that much about
popcorn or about circuits, if we're being super honest, But yeah,
so so like, well, will we ever be able to
build a camera out of food or radio antenna or
a radio emitter? Mm hmmm, how long until there's an
(34:00):
edible phone? Never give me an edible phone. I would
definitely be hungry, like in the middle of the night
and like like going to bed and would just eat
it and then I and I wouldn't wake up in
the morning because my alarm clock is my phone. Everything
would be terrible. It would also be unsanitary because you
know everybody takes their phone out when they go into
(34:21):
the bathroom. Okay, no edible phones. That that is not
the future of edible electronics. Okay, So I'm going to
steal an idea from a random internet comment I saw here.
Here's the thing, Okay, is this the future of edible electronics?
Comment or wisdom? Put GPS trackers in foods that you
fear maybe stolen, and if somebody yanks your lunch out
(34:44):
of the fridge at work and eats it without your consent,
you can track them down and get that lunch back.
I'm not sure if I would want to get the
lunch back. Well, it might be expensive electronics there if
it's worth it, Uh, no matter what, I like, like
(35:04):
making any I mean, even if, even if we never
come around to a point where our laptops are made
out of edible stuff. Uh. This this sounding more and
more like Willy Wonka. Even if we never get to
that point, any kind of process that's going to make
devices safer, that that are going into bodies, that are
helping patients, uh, that that are helping doctors help patients,
(35:26):
you know, get over terrible diseases or find their cancer
or whatever it is, that's great. Yeah, I think we
don't need to dream up any extra weird ways to
use edible electronics on top of the things that have
already been suggested by the researchers themselves. I mean, being
able to have something that's a safer option for internal
imaging or something that could retrieve foreign objects from the
(35:49):
inside of the body. I mean that alone is a
very worthwhile thing to research. So more power to the Yeah,
I did not I didn't know anything about anything getting
submerged in ham before this, and now I'm very concerned
about it. So I'm real glad that people are working
on it, and I think I think that that's just
about all that we have to say about edible electronics today. Yeah,
(36:11):
so wrapping this up, Hey, what do you guys think
about all this? Do you have a wacky edible electronic
that you would like to propose to us? We want
to hear about it if if there's one that we
particularly enjoy, we will let we will let the rest
of the podcast audience know about it out loud with
our voices. So send those in. You can send those
into our email address. It is FW thinking at how
(36:34):
Stuff Works dot com. You can visit us on Twitter
or Facebook. Our handles in both of those places are also,
strangely enough, FW Thinking. You can also visit our website
if you'd like to. We have a whole series of videos.
Do you guys know about those? Joe and I write
for them. Jonathan right sometimes he's the host of all
of them. They're great. They're produced by this guy named
Dan Bush, who's really nice has an adorable baby. So
(36:57):
go check those out, and uh, we hope to hear
from you. Either way, you will hear from us again
very soon for more on this topic and the future
of technology. I'll visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to
(37:25):
you by Toyota. Let's Go Places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, Ay, and welcome to Forward Thinking, to the
podcast that looks at the future and says and then
you're in the Man from Mars and you go out
at nine cars. I'm Joe McCormick and I'm Lauren volc
(00:24):
Obaum and our usual host Jonathan Strickland is not with
us today. He is somewhere. He's in Scotland getting his
acts sharpened. I'm not sure whether that's a metaphor or not,
but I'm willing to go with it quite literal. Not
the mystical I was hoping not the mister mistical acts
because the mystical acts is made of plastic, so if
(00:45):
he was having someone sharpen it, that would probably go
poorly for everyone involved. No, I think he's actually getting
a full suit of male armor made. I would I
would like that. I would appreciate. Oh, man, imagine if
you were that in the studio. It would make so
many interest noises. Yeah, the shuffling, Yeah, it's great, it
would be soothing. Yeah. Do you remember the time on
(01:07):
this podcast. I'm pretty sure it was on this podcast
in the past that we talked about crazy ants crazy.
I very dimly remember that. I honestly don't remember what
we recorded yesterday. There was some time when we were talking,
I know about crazy ants that are these ants that
are sort of known for getting into like you find
them inside your TV. Yeah, yeah, I remember reading all
(01:29):
of these weird news stories about this a few months
or maybe about a year back, when just these giant
populations of ants were taking over people's electronics and so
and so. The immediate assumption is, like, the ants are
eating my television. Why were they eating the TV? I
don't know if they were actually eating the electronics, but
(01:50):
they were at least attracted to the electronics or yeah, yeah,
they were swarming inside electronics because you know, a they're
they're nice dark places where they can nest and uh
and like something about the electrical current I think it was,
was was attractive to them and and then you would
find yeah, yeah, and then you would find a lot
of dead ones in there, because you know, they would
get zapped by the electrical current and just fill up
(02:11):
the whole space with their bodies. That's pretty cool. Well,
I wonder if those crazy ants that supposedly like to
eat electronics were onto something because there has been a
wave of interesting news in the technology world about edible electronics.
But not like, not like edible electronics, like you're eating
(02:33):
them for sustenance. I mean, right, surely not, because I mean, really,
it sounds like a kind of stupid idea to eat
any electronics, right, I mean, they're expensive, more expensive than food. Usually,
they're they're crunchy in ways that you don't want your
food to be. They probably don't taste all that good
to begin with. But let me give you a scenario
(02:54):
in which you may in fact decide that you want
to eat some electronics. I'll lay out the options for you. Okay,
let's say that, give me the menu. Yeah, you're you're
going in for checkout with your doctor, and your doctor
she looks over and she says, you know, just to
be safe, I'm going to need to take a look
at the inside of your lower g I tract and
(03:16):
inspect the inner lining of your colon for polyps and cancer. Okay.
I can see many situations in which I would want
to make sure I don't have cancer in my lower
gas ro intestinal tract, right, And the obvious way of
going about this is something you may very well be
familiar with. Its tube endoscopy. We're also known as the colonoscopy.
(03:36):
You're probably familiar with this procedure. It's a tube, it's
got a camera on it. It's inserted into the colon, yeah,
fed up along the lower tract of your intestine, and
allows the doctor to take a look around. And yes,
a procedure like this could save your life, So if
it's recommended by your doctor, it's worth getting. Probably go
along with what they say to do totally, despite any
(03:59):
perceived discomfort and embarrassment. But what if you had another
option other than the tube. Let's say that your doctor says, okay,
you can get the tube, or you can just take
a pill. And it works like this. You swallow a
clear plastic capsule containing a camera and an LED, and
(04:21):
this ingested imaging device can travel through your entire gi tract,
taking thousands of pictures as it goes along, and then
transmitting those pictures wirelessly to a receiver device worn on
the outside of the body. Now, the crazy thing is
this actually exists, and it's known as capsule indoscopy. For
(04:42):
many patients, it is obviously a much less troubling proposition
than tube in discopy. Well, and it's also a hypothetically
an outpatient treatment. When you go in for a colonoscopy,
you have to like get an I V and get
knocked out and spend you know, twenty four hours beforehand preparing.
Although I had imagine that that you would also have
to prepare for this kind of situation too. Yeah, somewhat,
(05:04):
but it is obviously lower investment on your party. Not
having to put someone under anesthesia is always preferable. Yeah,
So I'm not sure how much such a procedure stacks
up against the imaging power of a traditional colonoscopy today.
I found one study back from two thousand nine, so
you know, that's like seven years ago now, crazy, Uh
that that showed It showed back then traditional colonoscopy was
(05:29):
more sensitive. So if your doctor recommends you go with
the two, best to do as they say. But let's
say we just imagine a scenario where these su procedures
are the same cost, equally effective, and you can get
equally good imaging from either one. Who wouldn't go with
the pill. Most people would go with the pill, right,
(05:49):
So having a good capsule contained camera that can take
pictures inside the body is one thing. Um, but as
far as I'm aware, existing endoscopic capsule cameras are not
meant to actually be digested. They're meant to pass all
the way through you. Uh, and then once they go
outside the digestive system intact there you know you, yeah,
(06:11):
you Typically you don't have to recover them. They'll transmit
images to some kind of receiver and then you don't
have to go phish it out. But if one word,
to get stuck or damaged inside you, that would be
a bad thing. You might need some surgery to get
it removed. So these little pill machines might be considered
only semi edible. Sure, and and and right, you really
(06:35):
don't want that capsule breaking open because most of the
things that electronics are made of, and I kind of
meant to mention this earlier, aren't good for you. Oh yeah,
we'll talk about that in a minute. Yeah. But what
if you could eat tiny electronic machines that could do
work inside of you and then even potentially be digested
and absorbed without causing any harm to your body. This
(06:58):
is the subject of today's episode. Yes, edible electronics. Edible electronics,
So as weird as this sounds, it probably also sounds
fairly futuristic, but it's not an entirely new concept. This
isn't something that just showed up in the past few years.
Oh yeah, and and every time that the that the
science news media reports on it, it's like brand new,
but it's not. Um, well, okay, totally edible electronics don't
(07:22):
exist yet, but the underlying research into them has been
going on since at the very least, is the first
that the earliest paper that I could find from an
albeit brief search into uh ingestible electronics, which is kind
of the precursor here. That's like that the capsule endoscope endoscopy, endoscopy,
(07:44):
endoscopy endoscopy. Great words it is, I love words. UM
paper was a study of how the body reacts when
weights are lifted in different ways, and uh in a
swallowed sensor was measure pressure happening inside the abdomen during
the study. So interesting, um I've seen I've seen other
(08:06):
Science News site. The nineteen seventies is the beginning of
this kind of research, so it's a possibility that's been
going on for longer than that, but definitely ingustable biosign
trackers have been used in labs since nineteen uh and
and ingustable biosign trackers have been commercially available since that
is when a temperature sensor hit the market, which is
(08:29):
useful for getting accurate readings on a subject's core body
temperature when the subject is, you know, doing stuff and
not available to sit around with a thermometer in their mouth. Also,
thermometers in the mouth are not necessarily the most accurate
version of getting a subject's core body temperature, which can
come in very handy when you're trying to do something like, say,
(08:49):
prevent the injury of an athlete or an astronaut from
heat exhaustion and a heat stroke. The technology was actually
developed by the Johns Hopkins You Diversity Applied Physics Lab
and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center with with the specific
goal of putting these capsules and astronauts when they go
out on spacewalks and make sure that they're not overheating
(09:11):
in their space suits. Okay, that's interesting, Yeah, it makes sense.
So that does sound like a like a highly specialized
usage there, absolutely and even in the case of of
competitive athletes, making sure that those that those people are
not getting heat strokes as well is specialized. Many of us,
I understand, are not competitive athletes. I know I'm not.
(09:34):
Does competitive eating count? Are you competitive about eating? Have
you entered eating competitions? I do enter a kind of
like frenzied state whenever I'm made to eat at my
desk at work, because I'm afraid everybody can hear me chewing,
and I just want to get it over with as
fast as possible. I'm afraid that I I A. I
(09:55):
sit next to Joe in the office. You guys, and
uh and I've never heard you chew, so your relatively
what have you heard meet to electronics because that can
get you. Oh yeah, that's much crunch here. Okay, So
this kind of work has only been the beginning. Yeah,
uh there, there's been a huge body of this kind
of research, and we wanted to talk specifically about the
work of one Christopher Bettinger, who has done just a
(10:17):
lot of really great thought and writing about this. Yeah,
he showed up on on this topic recently. So he's
a Carnegie Melon professor, Christopher Beninger, and he's he's worked
with the idea of edible electronics for a while now.
So he imagines, for instance, a sensor that you could
swallow that would be able to monitor the state of
your gut by looking at the state of your microbiome
(10:40):
or checking for signs of g I problems like Crohn's
disease or or bacterial infections in the gut, Or like
you could take a pill that includes a machine that
would monitor your uptake of an ingested medication and track
how the drug is being absorbed by the body, or
for example, like a pill that contains a measure the
drug payload and then monitors conditions or placement inside your
(11:04):
body to selectively release specific amounts of medication based on
based on information, not just a dumb dose, but a
smart dose. Right, And hey, you know why stop at
swallowing electronics in order to improve healthcare outcomes. Motorola has
spoken to the makers of an ingestible electronic pill about
(11:25):
creating something that serves as an authenticator, So like, you
don't need to remember a pass code anymore or carry
around a ring of keys, because electronics around you, like
your phone or your laptop of your car would all
know who you are because of this electronic pill that
you ate. Oh, I think we've talked about this on
the show before, because I remembered us talking about the
(11:47):
cybersecurity of your personal waste, right, like, like, if there
was a pill authentication form, could somebody use your poop
to log in as you? They probably we could. That's
a nice thought. But anyway, going on with the with
the Bettinger's work, So so all those ideas, I just
(12:08):
said that that makes sense that that'd be a cool
thing to have, But hold your equines. Now, most electronics,
as we hinted at earlier, contain materials that would not
be very friendly to the inside of your body, especially
components like batteries, which often contain chemicals that are just
intrinsically toxic. You don't want to menu. And if one
(12:29):
of these toxic batteries get stuck in your GI tract
and does not pass through, this is a problem. Is
the same thing we were talking about with the camera
capsule earlier, Like it's fine if it just passes through
as normal. If it were to get stuck or something
that would be bad, you might need surgery. But this
is why so people in this field have been looking
towards ideas of using digestible or biodegradable materials to make
(12:54):
these edible electronics out of like making the electronics themselves
inherently endly to your body. So Bettinger authored a review
in a issue of Trends in Biotechnology called Materials Advances
for Next Generation Ingestible Electronic Medical Devices. And in this
review he sort of he points out a problem with
(13:15):
many existing electronic devices meant to go inside the body.
How do electronic implants get inside of you? While they
get in through invasive surgeries, which is always something we
should be trying to avoid if possible surgery comes with
a cost and a small risk to the patient. But
once these things are inside the body, then they have
to operate in what Beninger calls challenging micro environments. No
(13:38):
joke will be the body, Yeah, I mean, essentially, the
human body doesn't want stuff that isn't itself inside of itself. Yeah,
generally not so then, of course, once they're in there,
they can tend to cause bacterial infections and inflammation at
the implant site. And so advances in materials and strategies
for fabricating electronic devices to go inside the body could
(14:01):
help us avoid some of these problems. And ultimately he's
focused on finding new strategies for creating quote packaging, circuit design,
and onboard power supplies that are benign, non toxic, and
even biodegradable. These also on like great ideas, but are
there are there like category, can we break this down
(14:24):
a little bit like like is there are are there
pathways we can take in order to get there? Yeah?
He identifies sort of three major trends. One is miniaturization,
So that is sort of self explanatory, but it's a
trend toward devices and device components that are smaller but
also use less power. And that's important because power once
(14:45):
you get into extreme miniaturization of technology. Uh, as we've
seen on the show plenty of times, power is very
often a concern. So you've got like little tiny robots
that you want to you know, make into some kind
of swarm that will that will go inside people and
control their mind or whatever. We're usually researching, uh these things.
(15:05):
One of the big problems with them is how do
they talk to each other? And how do they how
do they move? But yeah, where does their power come from?
Batteries are not the easiest part. Another trend he identifies
is quote bioresorbable electronics, and that's this main thing towards
UH increased knowledge about how to make electronics components out
(15:28):
of materials that are transient and biodegradable rather than toxic
and indigestible like most batteries and things like that are.
And speaking of batteries, bio batteries is the last big trend.
He identifies non toxic biological materials that can serve as
energy storage, and this is one of the keys to
ingestable electronics. So let's go back to imagining these these
(15:51):
devices that you could swallow. So here's one that might
follow from Bettinger's ideas. The actual logic circuits in this
electronic device are made out of silicon contained in some
sort of biodegradable envelope. Silicon's not gonna hurt you. Other
components such as antennae or do we just say antenna's
(16:13):
now when we're talking about electronics rather than insects, I
think we might like idiots. Yeah, okay, I'm sorry, and
tenna's apologize on behalf of the language. Components like antenna's,
they're made out of benign, relatively non toxic materials like
maybe copper or magnesium, things that are technically essential nutrients
in your body, and that could certainly be be worked
(16:34):
into an electronic component in doses under the daily recommended value. Right,
you're already consuming them. They're already in you. As long
as you don't eat a just huge amount of them,
they're fine. So batteries again are one of the biggest questions.
But Beninger has been working on this problem, and as
of last year, I read news that his team had
(16:55):
built a battery with an anode made out of manganese oxide,
which is a normal, safe mineral found in the body.
Another one of those, and a cathode made out of melanin,
which is another thing naturally found in the body. It's
a natural pigment, so you find it in hair and
skin and your eyeballs. Yeah, exactly. And in many cases
the liquids inside the body, such as gastric fluid itself,
(17:17):
can be perfectly able to function as the electrolyte solution
through which current flows between the cathode and the Anna.
Oh oh, that's exciting. So it's it's like an open
battery system that sounds either exciting or bad. I'm I
think it's pretty cool, Okay, alright, cool, excellent. I'm worried
I'm I'm picturing I'm picturing what is probably not the
(17:41):
scientific case of just of just your whole stomach, like
like zapping you continually until the battery runs down. Well,
fortunately these batteries are not capable of that much power,
and it seems like they're going to be capable of
only a little bit of power, just enough to make
it work. Right. Ah, yeah, that that's right. I did
read a figure in which the battery, this type of
battery provided five milliwotts of power for for up to
(18:04):
twenty hours. And and that twenty hour kind of figure
is a good goal post that they're looking for, because
that's about as long as it takes for something to
move from your mouth out through your other end. So
so that's that's a good hallmark of how long a
battery like this should should last for an endoscopic camera. Um,
and it's it could probably, I'm not sure. I'm not
(18:24):
sure if it could quite power an endoscopic camera. Yet
it's certainly not enough to like power your smartphone. I
really love reading the work that Bedinger has been been
doing about all of this. It's it's really forward thinking.
I feel like we should have some kind of sound
cue whenever we mentioned the show's title in the episode.
But UM's, yeah, it's it's it's really it's really interesting,
(18:45):
um and and looking towards the future, but but also
absolutely describing a lot of what's already going on, Like
there's so many laboratory studies that I ran across while
we were doing this research that are using these principles
in order to to make stuff that people can swallow
for laboratory studies. It's it's it's great. And I and
I had no idea that any of this was going
(19:07):
on before we went into this. I love I love
it when I am surprised by all of the science
going on in our world. It's strange. Yeah, you'd think
you'd hear about people eating electronics, you would, You just don't. Huh, Well,
I got another one. Is pretty weird about this? How
about eating origami robots or what? Okay, okay, I can
(19:29):
I can start. It sounds laughable at first, but then
you think or Agby is nice and folded up and
and sometimes sharp corners pokey the inside of me. Right,
No that's not no, that's not the point. Um no,
but it could probably unfold and do stuff in your body. Yeahah, exactly.
So we we've talked about the research of m I
T computer scientists Dan yellow Russ on the show before. Yeah,
(19:52):
and she she's known for these robots or her group
has been doing some really interesting investigation of the concept
of edible electronic technology. So for a while now, Ruce
and her people have been working on these things, these
origami robots, shape shifting robots that can assemble themselves and
assume different morphologies when subjected to a stimulus. For example,
(20:14):
you have a flat piece of plastic or layered material
that you produced by three D printing or laser cutting,
and then when that material is subjected to some kind
of stimulus, say it's baked at a certain temperature, or
connected to batteries or submerged in water or something like that,
it will naturally fold into programmed shapes and configurations. Sometimes
(20:37):
it can even fold itself in a way that causes movement,
like the oregomy robot can bend itself in such a
way that it crawls or swims. Well, yeah, and this
is totally we We did an episode a long time
ago about for D printing, and this is the idea
behind all of that. Yeah, yeah, similar ideas definitely, Uh,
So how does it do this? Well? How? How how
(20:57):
would you have something that crawls just by bending? Uh?
Like several of Rus's robots, this robot has several layers
of material. So it has a middle layer of material
that shrinks or expands in response to temperature, and then
scoring on the outer layers of the material determines what
shapes the material bends into when the middle layer shrinks.
(21:20):
But so in so so, how does this come into
entering the body? Why would you put one of these
in your mouth? Well? In the most recent research, scientists
from this m I T Group and the University of
Sheffield and Tokyo Tech teamed up to test an origami
robot meant for the inside of the body in a
simulated esophagus and stomach. So one of the challenges here
(21:42):
is being able to make this bending, gut swimming robot
out of bio safe materials. Right in the end, uh
they used this biodegradable plastic film for the shrinking middle layer,
and that is known as bio lephon, and then that's
the part that contracts and empowers the movement, and then
the structural material, the outer material was made out of
(22:04):
dehydrated pig intestine a k a. The natural casing in
your sausage. Yeah yeah, that sounds really gross right up
until you think about how delicious sausages are and you
know that crispy coating on the outside natural pig intestine,
that's right. Oh yeah, so it's one of my favorite things.
On your charcuterie board. There may be a robot, especially
(22:26):
prepared by your chef for you for your stomach purposes.
But what would it do? Why would you want a
biodegradable origami robot crawling around inside your body made of
dehydrated pin intestine partially? Yeah. So let's say you accidentally
swallow a watch battery like you do sometimes. Maybe stuff happens,
(22:47):
cut your bowl of peanuts right next to your bowl
of batteries, and you can't take your eyes off the
season finale of The Bachelor. Oh my god, what are
they gonna say next? And so you accidentally tossed down
a fistful of toxic battery discs. This is something, this
is something that's happened in your house before. Yeah. No,
I can't say that that I've ever watched The Bachelor.
(23:07):
I have eaten batteries and sometimes, uh it's crazy, but
apparently I've read that this happens around thirty times a
year in the United States. I think primarily in young
children who don't know better than to not eat batteries.
Is candy pretty much? Sure, I mean they're shiny. Uh
(23:27):
So here I have no choice but to read a
truly sublime quote from the m I T News feature
on this research quote chu Hey, And this is one
of the researchers. Shouy bought a piece of ham, and
he put the battery on the ham. Ruce says, within
half an hour, the battery was fully submerged in the ham. Submerged,
(23:51):
submerged in the ham. So that made me realize that, yes,
this is important. If you have a battery in your body,
you really wanted out as soon as possible. That's Danielle
Rous speaking. Submerged in the hand, submerged in the ham,
and she is one correct that has convinced me and
(24:11):
emerged in the ham. Get that out of me. If
it can do that to ham, think about what it's
going to do to my squishy inside exactly. This is
a reflection of the fact that swallowed batteries or other
dangerous objects can burn into the walls of the stomach
and there hilarious. It's not funny, it's very tragic. Well,
(24:32):
you need to have some way of getting this thing
out of the body. You've got to be able to
get in and remove it. And so here's where the
origami robot comes in. Okay, how does the origami robot
save the day? So you swallow a capsule and in
the research, this is just a piece of ice with
the robot folded up and frozen and side so it's
like a piece of ice capsule. It might be a
different kind of thing if you were to actually have
(24:52):
something like this in a hospital. But you swallow it,
the capsule opens up inside your stomach and then releases
the tiny robot, and then the tiny robot can use
its bending motion to move around inside the body. Now
somebody on the outside then uses controlled magnetic fields to
direct the motion of the robot, and then the robot
(25:12):
moves to the foreign object, maybe the battery that submerged
in the ham inside your stomach, and then it attaches
to the battery, lifts it out of the tissue where
it's become embedded, and then from there the robot and
the foreign object can be safely passed on through the
digestive system. I can't believe that we've gotten this far
in the episode so far without mentioning um Martin Short
(25:34):
and the amazing film Inner Space. You know, I think
I've actually never seen that, though I've talked about it
on the podcast before. Yeah, I think I there used
to be a ride at Epcot Center that had something
to do with all of this. There was one going
Inside the Body movie that was serious, and then I
think one that was a comedy. Right. I think the
one I'm talking about was the comedy. I don't think
(25:56):
Martin Short does that many serious films that could be wrong.
I and checked up on him in a while. I'm
gonna feel really bad if he's dead. I'm not sure. No,
he's doing great. Oh oh okay, I'm I'm very much relieved. Okay, Well, hey,
how any other edible electronics you want to tell me about, Lauren. Yes,
one bit of research that we saw that, the bit
that inspired this episode to begin with, actually is about
(26:18):
a truly edible electronic component, like digestible, like made out
of food, so not just something that can be digested
and it's fine. It's something that is meant to be digested,
that is mostly entirely meant to be digested. Yes, okay.
So in May of twenty sixteen, a team out of
Arizona State University published a paper in the journal Advanced
(26:39):
Materials Technologies about their lab testing of a super capacitor
made out of food products. Super Capacitors are a type
of like short term energy storage that can be used
to deliver little jolts of power. Um, it's it's it's
a battery type component. It's not as powerful as a
battery would be, but it's good in certain situations that
(27:00):
you don't want to send a battery into necessarily. And
uh yeah, the team the team used a simulated human
stomach to uh to test these devices in and they
managed to successfully zap and kill some E. Coli bacteria.
Pretty cool, and also to power and LED and also
to power and endoscopic camera, so that was pretty cool
(27:25):
for about three minutes. After three minutes, the device was
digested by the artificial gastric fluid. But so how did
they do it? Good question? What was their recipe? Was
it anything like the ones we've seen already? No? Uh no,
Pagan testines at all. Uh well, okay, they experimented with
a bunch of different food stuffs. Pagan testines may have
(27:47):
been involved, but they settled on a sandwich kind of thing. Okay.
So it was a combination of gelatine and cheddar cheese
as a protective casing. Um. Some the electrodes were made
out of devated charcoal, which is a stuff that's available
in dietary supplements. People take those those anti hangover pills.
People take something like that. Uh So yeah, I activated
(28:09):
charcoal bound with egg whites and then dried where the
electrode layers. This sounds like Body Builder. The electrodes were
separated by a sheet of seaweed which was soaked in
the electro light, which was gatorade or a Bonster energy drink. Um. So,
so ions from the liquid electrolyte could flow through the
(28:30):
sheet of seaweed because she seaweed is you know, permeable, uh,
therefore creating a current. But the seaweed is solid enough
to prevent the electrodes from making contact with each other.
And then sheets of gold leaf, which are used as
decoration and high end pastry and sometimes an Indian food,
served as the current. Collectors to make the whole thing viable.
(28:52):
So so they built these devices up like a like
like teeny little lasagnia ravioli is kind of the little
little sandwiches. Um, moving from the outside to the center.
It was gelatin sheet, cheddar cheese, gold leaf egg and
charcoal stuff electric like soaked seaweed, and then out again
in the opposite order, a little sandwich and the whole thing.
(29:16):
Each of the devices, uh is a little square, like
a little bit larger than the size of a soy
sauce packet. And according to the studies principal investigator hen
King Jong, it tastes like cheese. What kind of cheese
cheddar cheese? Yeah? I mean and actually actually the straight
the straight quote from Arizona State University from from its
(29:39):
press release about this whole thing is even better than
just to taste like cheese. The quote is asked what
the combination tastes like, Jong replied, it is cheese. It
is cheese. I thought I thought you'd like that in
particular too. Um. But but if you're worried that this
(30:01):
isn't like weird enough, worry not. They experimented with all
kinds of other strange ingredients when coming up with this recipe.
A few small examples MSG barbecue sauce, jello, and gummy candies.
Boy ah, in that same I'm going to object to.
So you've listed a lot of foods talking about this,
(30:22):
and I don't know if I consider all of them
fully edible. You've named Monster Energy drinks. Uh, gummy candy?
Is MSG a food? It's a food additive product. It's
made of salt, It's made of a lot of solid accent.
Is that accent stuff that used to be in people's grandparents? Oh,
(30:44):
I have I have no idea. I don't think i've
heard of that. I missed the accent days. I remember
thinking it was just pure MSG. It could be wrong.
It's a possibility. And n SG is real tasty. I
don't get headaches from it. I consider myself very lucky.
In that press release, Jong also said that he had
a hard time getting the university to reimburse his lab
(31:04):
receipts at first, because they like just they were like,
you're just out there throwing parties. We're not going to
reimburse your party receipts for all this barbecue sauce and
Monster Energy Drink and seaweed sheets. If those are the
things that anyone is using to throw a party. By
the way, Arizona State University, I don't just give it
(31:24):
to of them like they're they're honestly not living on
a lot. So the chemistry, yeah, yeah, all of that aside.
They they're continuing their research. They hope to improve the
gelatine casing in order to make future iterations of these
devices last longer in the digestive tract than three minutes.
(31:45):
Longer than three minutes would be pretty pretty useful. They
also want to make it smaller by using a three
D printer to do the manufacturing work rather than making
them by hand. And furthermore, they're they're working on a
wireless charging system that would let them re charge the
device or you know, assuming that the device lasted longer
than three minutes, remotely while the device is inside a
(32:07):
human body HM. Which is one of the cool things
about super capacitors. You can you can recharge them and
have them release that charge many much multiple times more
easily than many rechargeable batteries. Yeah. Cool, pretty cool. This
is quite strange. It is, and and it's terrific because
(32:27):
it's it's kind of got a handle on that battery
leg of the of the research stool that we're working. Oh,
I'm just not Maybe I shouldn't use the word stool
when we're already making lots of metaphors about colo. That's
a good one stool because if you know, stool is
three legged, one wobble and nice and stable. And there
(32:50):
were there were two other legs which I am mostly
forgetting about. And it it suggests a platform on which
future research can be built. Absolutely, yeah, And you know, Okay,
so I think that actually this this battery concept, like
making a traditional anode cathode battery out of food, might
be a little bit more complicated. But but supercapacitors are
are great in this because they're they're really quite simple
(33:12):
devices relatively speaking, that only need to do like basic
chemical work. So they're pretty good candidates for being made
out of edible stuff because edible stuff does chemical work. Anyway. Now,
I'm sure there are a lot of other components in
the electronics that you can make out of stuff that
won't hurt you, but you probably can't make out of
(33:34):
like food, food, actual food. Yeah, Like you're not going
to like get like some popcorn and like turn it
into a circuit. Probably, I don't know that much about
popcorn or about circuits, if we're being super honest, But yeah,
so so like, well, will we ever be able to
build a camera out of food or radio antenna or
a radio emitter? Mm hmmm, how long until there's an
(34:00):
edible phone? Never give me an edible phone. I would
definitely be hungry, like in the middle of the night
and like like going to bed and would just eat
it and then I and I wouldn't wake up in
the morning because my alarm clock is my phone. Everything
would be terrible. It would also be unsanitary because you
know everybody takes their phone out when they go into
(34:21):
the bathroom. Okay, no edible phones. That that is not
the future of edible electronics. Okay, So I'm going to
steal an idea from a random internet comment I saw here.
Here's the thing, Okay, is this the future of edible electronics?
Comment or wisdom? Put GPS trackers in foods that you
fear maybe stolen, and if somebody yanks your lunch out
(34:44):
of the fridge at work and eats it without your consent,
you can track them down and get that lunch back.
I'm not sure if I would want to get the
lunch back. Well, it might be expensive electronics there if
it's worth it, Uh, no matter what, I like, like
(35:04):
making any I mean, even if, even if we never
come around to a point where our laptops are made
out of edible stuff. Uh. This this sounding more and
more like Willy Wonka. Even if we never get to
that point, any kind of process that's going to make
devices safer, that that are going into bodies, that are
helping patients, uh, that that are helping doctors help patients,
(35:26):
you know, get over terrible diseases or find their cancer
or whatever it is, that's great. Yeah, I think we
don't need to dream up any extra weird ways to
use edible electronics on top of the things that have
already been suggested by the researchers themselves. I mean, being
able to have something that's a safer option for internal
imaging or something that could retrieve foreign objects from the
(35:49):
inside of the body. I mean that alone is a
very worthwhile thing to research. So more power to the Yeah,
I did not I didn't know anything about anything getting
submerged in ham before this, and now I'm very concerned
about it. So I'm real glad that people are working
on it, and I think I think that that's just
about all that we have to say about edible electronics today. Yeah,
(36:11):
so wrapping this up, Hey, what do you guys think
about all this? Do you have a wacky edible electronic
that you would like to propose to us? We want
to hear about it if if there's one that we
particularly enjoy, we will let we will let the rest
of the podcast audience know about it out loud with
our voices. So send those in. You can send those
into our email address. It is FW thinking at how
(36:34):
Stuff Works dot com. You can visit us on Twitter
or Facebook. Our handles in both of those places are also,
strangely enough, FW Thinking. You can also visit our website
if you'd like to. We have a whole series of videos.
Do you guys know about those? Joe and I write
for them. Jonathan right sometimes he's the host of all
of them. They're great. They're produced by this guy named
Dan Bush, who's really nice has an adorable baby. So
(36:57):
go check those out, and uh, we hope to hear
from you. Either way, you will hear from us again
very soon for more on this topic and the future
of technology. I'll visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to
(37:25):
you by Toyota. Let's Go Places
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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