Sugar is what provides  energy for many animals but what if it could provide something more?

Biofuel cells are capable of converting chemical energy into electrical energy. Along with his team at Clarkson University in Potsdam, USA,  Evgeny Katz has wired up some snails so that glucose will give them more than a sugar rush… their implanted biofuel cells now allow them to produce up to 7.45 microwatts of electricity.

Snails aren’t the only animals that have been teamed up with biofuel cells.  Other research has involved using cockroaches , rats and even grapes to produce electricity in this way. Since snails are relatively small creatures, naturally there’s a limit to how much electricity they’re capable of producing. Katz and his team have stated that they intend to try a similar process with lobsters in the near future.

What’s the point of powering up these plants and critters? While these biofuel cells are too small to power large devices, they’re capable of providing electricity over long periods of time in way that’s 100% sustainable. As mentioned in a previous post, NASA recently developed  a small space robot powered by microbial fuel cell (MFC) technology. Whereby electricity is generated by the metabolic processes of bacteria. Applications  for biofuel cells may eventually include self-powered pace makers as well as other implanted medical devices.

While sealed batteries are still an adequate power source for pace makers, they don’t tend to be useful in more complicated applications. For this reason,  Philippe Cinquin and his team at the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France are exploring the use of biofuel cells in rats to produce power that would be compatible with the requirements of pacemakers and other artificial organs such as:  pancreas, urinary sphincters and kidneys.

For more information about these Cyborg snails and other electric creatures check out an article featured in this month’s Nature. You can also learn more about biofuel cells from Philippe Cinquin in a video from the BBC below.

Protagonist of  Eidos-Montreal’s new video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution,  Adam Jensen is a crime fighting cyborg in the year 2027. Like real-life cyborgs, the video game character underwent radical surgeries to merge his body with mechanical parts after a devastating accident.

To celebrate the game’s August release, the company commissioned self-proclaimed ¨eyeborg¨Rob Spence to make a brief documentary to give us an idea of how far today’s bionic and prosthetic technologies are from being capable of creating cyborgs like Adam Jensen.

Spence lost his eye to a shot gun accident and now uses a bionic one that acts as a camera, transmitting video to a receiver. While Spence’s prosthetic eye includes no direct interface with his brain, the documentary introduces us to  Miikka Terho who suffered from genetic blindness until a 3×3 mm chip implanted under his eye allowed him to detect objects with his own eyes.

This documentary will give you a glimpse of these and other prosthetics as well as the amazing people who use them. It might also make you wonder how far off we may be from our own kind of human revolution as this type of technology continues to evolve as quickly as the rest.

Check out some videos of South Africa’s  impressive athlete Oscar Pistorius who was born without a fibula.

While ancient and modern tools serve as an extension of our physical selves, today’s technology also allows us to extend our mental selves. This is what Amber Case discusses in a TED talk on her  reasons for becoming a Cyborg Anthropologist.

While she opinions that technology is helping us become closer to one another, she’s concerned about the dwindling amount of time people are spending being close to themselves; time where we turn off our laptops and cell phones and engage in some good old self-reflection.

Journalist Carl Honoré  shares a similar concern. Check out his TED talk below where he discusses our need for speed in a ¨roadrunner society¨.

Image: Olishaw

According to writer, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark, being a  cyborg is just part of human nature

Generally, the term cyborg refers to a biological being whose capabilities have been enhanced by or are dependent on a machine.
Most of us can easily relate this concept to cases such as that of Kevin Warwick, professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England. Warwick underwent his first experimental surgery in 1998 when he had a silicone chip transpoder implanted in his forearm which allowed a computer to monitor him as he walked through the halls of the university enabling him to operate lights, locks, heaters and computers without lifting a finger.

Another example of real life cyborgs are the patients of Viennese surgeon, Professor Oskar Aszmann who has successfully performed several ¨bio-reconstructions¨ whereby patients who suffered accidents rendering a hand paralysed underwent voluntary amputations of their hands in exchange for bionic ones (see BBC’s video below).

However, Andy Clark and others of a like mind do not view intricate implants as prerequisites to cyborgism. In his 2003 book,  Natural Born Cyborgs, Clark states that ¨Human brains maintain an intricate cognitive dance with an ecologically novel, and immensely empowering, environment: the world of symbols, media, formalisms, texts, speech, instruments and culture. The computational circuitry of human cognition thus flows both within and beyond the head… more so than any other creature on the planet, we humans emerge as natural-born cyborgs, factory tweaked and primed so as to be ready to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures: ones whose systemic boundaries far exceed those of skin and skull¨.

How much of a cyborg are you?