Edible Electronics, Penis Transplants, and Your Right to Internet Access

A food-based supercapacitor could make medical diagnoses easier (and cheesier). The world’s second-ever penis transplant is a success. Plus, dead fish and final exams have caused governments to shut down Internet access.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to How Stuff Works. Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum,
a researcher and writer. Here at How Stuff Works. Every week,
I'm bringing you three stories from our team about the
weird and wondrous developments we've seen in science, technology, and culture.
This week. Given some recent headlines from Vietnam and Iraq,
we exploil a question of whether internet access is a

(00:23):
human right, and given a headline from here in the
United States, we report on the second ever successful penis transplant.
Yes but first. Senior writer Robert Lamb brings us the
story of a research team that managed to make a
functioning super capacitor out of food products. The team says
their university gave them a hard time with the expense reports.
They saw barbecue, sauce and energy drinks and assumed that

(00:46):
they were throwing parties. That's right, eat a motherboard sandwich
mcg ivor. Because engineering professor Dr Han Queen Young and
his team made a super capacitor out of food stuffs.
They combined water act the dated charcoal pellets, egg white
gold foil, gelatine, cheddar cheese, seaweed, and Monster energy drink

(01:06):
into a sandwich the size of a soy sauce packet,
all of this resembling across between ravioli and shark eggs.
This tight little package of edible materials can travel the
human digestive highway with ease. But more importantly, you can
hook the thing up to an electric current and store
a temporary charge on it prior to ingestion. And yes,
since the device is casing is cheddar cheese, the supercapacitor

(01:30):
itself tastes like cheese and is the world's first non
vegan electronic components. So sorry vegans. Now, seeing as we
don't live in a David Cronenberg film, you're probably wondering
why a human would want to swallow an organic electrical
capacitor to begin with. Well, for starters, the researchers demonstrated
this little spark Ravioli's ability to kill disease causing bacteria

(01:52):
like a coli in vitro. Even more important, however, is
its potential to power the tiny wireless cameras used in
capsule into scopy with no worries about contamination if the
capsule breaks. A whole host of biomedical devices could benefit
from the technology, especially if three D printers could be
outfitted to create even smaller edible supercapacitors cheaply and on demand.

(02:19):
Next up, senior writer Jonathan Strickland explains two recent cases
of a government restricting its citizens access to the Internet
over seemingly strange issues, dead fish and school exams. The
Internet is still a relatively young technology, and yet it's
hard to imagine our world without it. So how would
you feel if your country's government restricted your access to

(02:41):
the Internet. It's something that has happened several times in
the past, despite the United Nations declaring that Internet access
should be unrestricted except in a few cases prescribed by
international human rights law, and it may have happened recently
in Vietnam, where it all has to do with pollution
and fish. Since April, dead fish have been turning up

(03:01):
in rivers and on shorelines. Many in Vietnam blame a
Taiwanese company called Formosa Plastics. It turns out Formosa had
an illegal waste pipe, but the company maintains it isn't
responsible for the fish dying. The Vietnamese government required Formosa
to dig up and remove the pipe. According to city
government officials, the real culprit might be a polluted canal

(03:23):
system coupled with heavy rains. But for two weeks protesters
used Facebook to organize rallies in major cities calling for
Formosa to admit responsibility for the dead fish. Then, mysteriously,
people in Vietnam discovered they couldn't access Facebook or Instagram.
Did the government shut down access to Facebook to prevent

(03:44):
further protests as we record this episode? The answer is unclear,
but many are assuming as much. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the
Ministry of Communication shut down all access to the Internet
three times for three hours each why to stop students
from cheating on exams. Apparently Iraqi schools have a problem

(04:06):
with students bringing mobile devices into exam rooms. Cutting off
Internet access nationally wasn't effective if excessive solution. Perhaps this
will mean the return of the old reliable method of
writing answers down on the palm of your hand, or
maybe it will even lead to students studying harder for exams.
But jokes aside, this policy impacts everyone in i Rock,

(04:29):
not just students, and human rights advocacy groups like Access
Now have spoken out against the strategy. Is it ever
okay for a government to limit or remove Internet access?
We've seen it happen during contentious elections in Uganda, during
the Arab Spring uprisings in eleven and as a matter
of general policy in China. And finally, today, I've got

(04:59):
the story of the world second successful penis transplant from
a deceased organ donor. I spent two days researching this, y'all.
It's a crazy dream job. I mean it is. But
all jokes aside, why are we reporting on the second instance?
Lots of the time, we as science reporters aren't too

(05:21):
concerned with the second instance of anything, but well, first
of all, we should be because that means the science
behind the first instance is working. That's rad Secondly, in
this case, it's more than just a salacious headline. Penal
cancer is relatively rare, affecting between one and four men
out of every one hundred thousand in different populations around

(05:42):
the world. Still, in the U S alone, some two
thousand new cases will be diagnosed in that's according to
the American Cancer Society. The most common treatment is penectomy
and at least partial removal of the penis to prevent
the disease from spreading and becoming fatal. That's what happened
to Thomas Manning, the sixty four year old recipient of

(06:03):
the world's second successful penis transplant. Three years ago, a
work accident led him to a hospitalization during which his
aggressive and potentially fatal cancer was detected. One lucky accident
after a partial penoctomy left him with a one inch stump.
Manning reported such a decreased quality of life that he
convinced a medical team to develop a transplant plan. Transplanting

(06:25):
any organ is a massive undertaking. The first such surgery
that actually worked, a kidney transplant among identical twins, didn't
happen until nineteen fifty four. Now thousands of kidney, liver,
and lung transplants are conducted each year in the U
S alone, but the first successful penis transplant didn't happen
until in South Africa. It restored urological and sexual function

(06:48):
to a twenty one year old had had a penectomy
after his ritual circumcision went poorly and Gang Green sent in.
Following in that team's footsteps, Manning's twelve surgeon team performed
the procedure over fifteen hours. They say they're cautiously optimistic
that Manning will regain seventy of his former function, and
Manning himself is in good spirits. That last part maybe

(07:10):
the least scientific factor in the surgery, but it's still important.
The first attempted penis transplant, conducted in China in two
thousand and six, went physically well, but ended in the
removal of the transplanted organ, reportedly due to the patients
and his wife's psychological distress and quality of life is,
after all, the point of penile transplants. Manning's team and

(07:31):
others like them are hoping to apply these results not
only to other cancer patients, but also to combat veterans
and other men with severe pelvic injuries. And that's our
show for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in.
Subscribe now for more of the latest and strangest science news,
and Hey, send us your ideas for new stories, plus

(07:53):
any snack suggestions. I'm really hungry. Shoot us an email
at now podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and
to access thousands of other stories like these, check out
our home planet now dot haustuff works dot com. M
m HM