http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1688...uman-blood.html

"Yeast cells feeding on the glucose in human blood might one day power implants such as pacemakers. A living source of power that is able to regenerate itself would eliminate the need for regular operations to replace batteries."

Note that while the article was posted on 01 April, this IEEE citation wasn't.

freaky and interesting at the same time.

now get those cybereyes going, damn it. my eyesight is probably to bad for even laser surgery by now...

This technology was predicted last year, at the very latest. That armphone implant that everyone was obsessing about mentioned using the blood for a power source.

true, but did not go into details.

but thanks for bringing that up. it reminded me of the equally interesting developments going on in flexible, color e-ink screens.

full body, modifiable, tattoos, anyone?

im guessing a system like this, with a capacitor style energy storage, could potentially make things like implant phones work.

park the radio and electronics in a more "open" area of the body, run wires to the larynx and ear (cochlear implant, anyone?), and charge it via a system like this. presto, implant phone.

only real problem is the act of dialing, i guess

i thought that they were thinking of putting dams in your veins and arteries. Highly impractical, but kinda funny.

Wouldn't that result in horrible clotting or strokes. Man that sounds alittle risky...lol

not sure how practical that would be, given that the veins themselves move to apply pressure (or something like that).

dams are used primarily to augment gravity generated pressure by putting a large mass behind a stream of water (if i got my physics right).

I read it as they would reroute blood supply to pass through the energy-extraction system and then back into the bioogical circulatory system. Given that it was blue skies thinking, they didn't go into much detail.

In which case essence is clearly a measure of blood consumption vs. blood production. Cyberlimbs take a lot of essence because they take away so much marrow. Reaction enhancers take so much essence because they burn so much blood to operate.

The first reasonable, non-metagame (read balance) explanation of essence I have ever seen.

All this is (I presume), is using yeast to convert sugars to alcohol, and then that alcohol can be used in a fuel cell to power whatever you want. I don't know of any microbes around that are able to convert sugar directly to an electrical charge.

And if the entire thing is just producing alcohol for use in a fuel cell, then all you need to do is route the blood through some device where the yeast can get at the sugars contained. Though frankly, I would think it'd be easier to connect the thing to the stomach or intestines, to get at the food source there.

There are optional rules in Augmentation if you want to play with having to charge your cyberware.

I think the idea of having yeast power your cybernetics has other problems. There will be people that are allergic to the yeast used and there is the question on how the yeast hampers healing in the area that it is implanted. You may reject your cyberware not because of the cyberware but because of the batteries it uses.

Isn't that covered with the Sensitive System negative quality?

Than you have to bring the energy produced to the plce where you intend it being consumed, for peacemakers it would be from the stomach/intestines (intestines would probably be better as stomach's PH would probably affect negatively the cell's cells).

The process outlined in the link in the OP mentioned that the way that yeast operates frees a couple of electrons. You use a mediator chemical that can difuse through the cell membrane to transfer the charge from the yeast to an electrode (thanks to the handy properties of charged particles). Low energy electrons from the other electrode fall into the gaps that're left over.

Yes, I finally read through the article. You're still using a catalyst to help strip electrons from the yeasts products, and you still have a proton exchange membrane that squeezes the hydrogen ions through, and your fuel cell products are still water. You're just not doing it like you would in a car. The other thing I'd wonder about with this technology is the bodies ability to deal with the water the fuel cell is produced. I mean, you can't juts dump it to the bloodstream, can you?

It's interesting technology, but clearly a long way off from any practical application. And as far as real-life justification for Shadowrun technologies, you don't really need something that plausible, just some science-y sounding explanation and a bit of hand waving.

Fluff tells us that cyberware is powered directly by the body's own systems. We have incredibly efficient power generation in Shadowrun, allowing powerful cyber implants to be powered by the body's own electrical field, heat, and probably kinetic motion too. The idea of using biotic power probably doesn't mesh with Shadowrun's concept of cyberware, the idea is that it's machine, it's not alive.

I've never heard that stated in a sourcebook, and it wouldn't make sense if it were - much to the chagrin of the computers who run the Matrix, the human body does not produce enough of an electrical field or heat to run much of anything, muchless a full-sized cyberlimb.

I'd like to point out that the blurb on page 13 of BattleRun states that people can have a lot of cyberware and use magic normally if they use blood magic. This would seem to suggest that blood, not heat or electricity, is the critical resource.

Bioware also saps Essence and is alive. Just because part of the machine works by using living things doesn't mean that it's not a machine. Soft nanotech is alive, too. You'd call a sewage treatment plant a machine, a thing, etc. But it uses microbes to break things down.

Just because something has some living components, doesn't make it less a machine.

Fluf teels us that cyberlimbs somehow do not need to be recharged, in Augmentations (it seems me it was there) is stated that there are various possible ways to produce power and its production should be considered a solved problem that GM/players should just think about having fun; and the machine draining the energy from organism in wich is implanted is very alienating/cyberpunk IMO.

[side note]
The W Brothers originally planned to have the machines using all the human brains in parallel as a giant supercomputer which is more reality and more SR. It was the studio that changed it. Yeah Hollywood!
[/side note]

They are already shrinking the size of batteries while increasing their capacity. It is fully believable that by SR times that people would replace the batteries in their Cyber every year (during their regular checkups). There may also be a series of energy generators (some mentioned above), like solar panel paint, accelerometers, radio wave inductive chargers (think foxhole radio but used to store energy in capacitors instead), and many other possibilities (outside the bodies energy field and body heat).

Well, I know for sure in SR3 that it said that cyberware was somehow hooked into the body's power generation system. The human body can power muscles, there's no reason why it wouldn't be able to power cybermuscles too. We can use nanotech to create muscles that are stronger and use less energy, and don't get fatigued. The human body is ingenious for being as efficient as it is, but nanoscale technology will be even better. I don't think it's that implausible to harness the small amounts of electricity and large amounts of body heat as a power source. And if you don't like that, how about superconductive circuits powered by a nanofactured battery that needs to be replaced once every 10 years? If you had superconductivity, you'd have virtually no power loss for the system, so charging would be unecessary. And we don't have to rule out chemical reactions as a power source either, it's quite plausible that cyberware could extract glucose from the blood and perform the same reactions as mitochondria to generate power. I just don't think they'd be doing anything as primitive as using a biotic solution for this, it would probably be done my a more efficient system of nanobots.

Actually the amount of energy in a AA battery is about 2 Calories, and I am talking food calories. 8 Billion+ people doing next to no work hooked up to some advanced equipment could generate a lot of energy. Though that would require some advanced biology to get the body to burn calories without doing work, and some amazing technology that could pull the heat from the body (while maintaining the 98.7F temperature) and convert it to electrical energy. Which is pretty hard, thermoelectrics aren't very amazing.

Also this technology could not power the implants in SR. Right now that sort of thing would increase your daily intake from 2000 calories to 2005 calories. It would be nothing more than the other bacteria that lives in everyone's digestive system.

But powering an SR implant would be way more, especially if you are talking about a full cyberlimb with more strength than a normal human limb.

Also a couple thoughts I had when I was reading that article is they do have a few major things to work out. Like how do you ensure the yeast don't over-reproduce or under-reproduce? What about when you work out really hard, muscles generate lactic acid in response to anaerobic activities, but yeast produce alcohol, would you have to worry about getting drunk or at least a little dipsy? Though that would be just another reason to work out.....

Battery size has actually been a huge issue, and we are still using the basic battery configuration for many things that we used in the 1890s (lead plate batteries, for instance, with the only real change being using different elements). You could argue we're due for a revolution in battery technology, but short of that revolution, there's nothing to suggest our battery technology will significantly improve, muchless to the point you're talking about. And since the books have said that the cyberware runs off the body and not off everything else you mentioned (with most of those things creating almost no energy in practice), I suspect your second point is also off. You may as well just say it runs off handwavium.



1) You could generate that same amount of energy by just burning that food in a boiler connected to a turbine (with less infrastructure)
2) That food has to come from somewhere, which they've never explained. No sun means no plants, and all food is just converting one energy source into another. Why bother taking your energy source, whatever it might be, covert it to food to convert (via humans) into heat and electrical energy, when you can just tap into that energy source directly?


But powering an SR implant would be way more, especially if you are talking about a full cyberlimb with more strength than a normal human limb.



Maintain a sterile environment and control other available resources (remember yeast requires oxygen and sugar, and is very heat-sensitive)



Assuming that alcohol is returned to the bloodstream, I assume you'd build up a tolerance. But it's funny to imagine people complain about how all they can afford is synthahol, when in reality, grade-A booze is pumping through their veins after every workout.

I really can't stand when people use modern technology arguments to explain why something wouldn't work in a fictional universe set 60 years in the future. We have no idea what turns technology will take, and the developers can't explain that technology either, because if we knew how it would work, we'd probably have built it already.

Anyway, I have a problem with the idea of yeast being the primary method of powering cyberware. We may not know what cyberware is, but we know what it isn't, and that's organic. I have never seen a hint of any organic component to cyberware, ever, in any piece of fluff. I just think it's unthematic to assume that cyberware will be powered by biotic sytems, it breaks the entire man/machine dichotomy. It may or may not be plausible, and its alternatives may or may not be plausible, but no matter what I don't like the idea and it's not endorsed by canon at all.

I have to agree here. This is also why speculative works often get it wrong.



Technically, cyberware is powered by a metagame balance issue we know and love called Essence. While I respect your right to disagree if you so choose, I actually like the idea that part of your humanity - a measurable, quantifiable part - is powering the machine that you have decided is more important than your flesh.

But, as in all things SR, YMMV.

Yeah, most of these in-depth technical arguments to support Shadowrun fiction kind of seem like grasping at straws. The fictional world that we play Shadowrun in doesn't have to follow any rules that we've got in the real world. All I'm looking for out of my Cyberware sourcebooks is a vaguely technical-sounding description and some stats, and thats good enough for me.

Canon has made it clear that cyberware never needs to be recharged, that it doesn't rely on much, if any electricity. However, I've never seen anything saying that cyberware does not have anything organic in it. To the contrary, Boosted Reflexes are clearly a organic/chemical treatment, yet is still broadly called cyberware. Including organic material is neither contrary to, nor specifically supported by canon.