CRYSTAL BALL: SUGAR BATTERIES

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that there’s a lot of power packed into sugar: sugary glucose, processed from food, is powering your body, brain and mouse hand right now. But battery science is beginning to follow the path that nature’s more or less perfected, with the advent of power sources that make use of sugar itself – in all its forms - to enhance battery efficiency, or even generate electricity directly.

For starters, a study group at Saint Louis University has produced a prototype fuel cell that can make use of any sugary substance to generate electricity, with potential gains of three to four times the single-charge endurance of a lithium-ion battery. The enzymes inside the cell, living on organic membranes derived from crustaceans, chow down on sugars to produce electricity, with water as a byproduct. Tree sap, glucose and soft drinks have all been trialled, but carbonation seems to harm the cell, which works best with simple table sugar dissolved in water. And all materials used are biodegradable, as opposed to the exotic and rather toxic compounds found in conventional batteries.

So far the efficiency of sugar-to-electricity conversion is around 20 percent – not much to brag about to Mother Nature – but big improvements are anticipated. Study leader Dr. Shelley Minteer sees early possibilities for the technology in items such as disposable one-use cellphone rechargers. The US Department of Defence, which bankrolled the research, is also anticipating useful items for use in locations far from the nearest wall socket.

The sugar cell technology has been licensed to a company for commercial adaptation, and is expected to hit the market in three to five years. In the meantime, researchers at China’s Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science have been trying to improve the charging abilities of lithium-ion batteries, and have gotten very promising results from silicon coated in microscopic carbon nanotubes made from – you guessed it – sugar. The sugary compound is looked to as a possible solution to the typical degradation of rechargeable batteries in laptops and cellphones.

However, as wonderful as sugar’s possibilities are, it’s not the only natural product being examined as a power source. The development of dirt-cheap, credit-card sized ‘biochips’ for disease detection has been of interest to scientists for years, but the problem of an equally convenient power source has been tough to solve. Now, researchers in Singapore are making use of the very substance under examination, with a medical urine test that uses a chemical reaction from urine itself to power the biochip and generate the result. It may not catch on for electric toothbrushes, but this kind of thinking could offer big advances in medical diagnostics – including, perhaps, blood tests that run on the very blood glucose that powers us.

So it all comes back to sugar after all.

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