In a ghastly vision of a future cut off from sunlight, the machine overloads in the Matrix movie series turned to sleeping human bodies as sources of electricity. If they’d had sunlight, algae would undoubtedly have been the better choice.
Engineers from the University of Cambridge in the UK have run a microprocessor for more than six months using nothing more than the current generated by a common species of cyanobacteria. The method is intended to provide power for vast swarms of electronic devices.
“The growing Internet of Things needs an increasing amount of power, and we think this will have to come from systems that can generate energy, rather than simply store it like batteries,” says Christopher Howe, a biochemist and (we assume) non-mechanical human.
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