Bionics is thus distinct from bioengineering (or biotechnology), which is the use of living things to perform certain industrial tasks, such as the culture of yeasts on petroleum to furnish food proteins, the use of microorganisms capable of concentrating metals from low-grade ores, and the digesting of wastes by bacteria in biochemical batteries to supply electrical energy.
Like little batteries, bacteria have two charges: positive on the outside of their cell membranes, negative on the inside.
As an important p-type transition-metal oxide with a narrow band gap varying between 1.2 and 1.8 eV [5], CuO has been widely studied in thermal conductivity [6], optoelectronic device systems [7], CO oxidation [8], eradication of multi-drug resistant bacteria [9], Li ion batteries anodes [10], heterogeneous catalyst for olefin epoxidation [11], gas sensing [12, 13] and glucose sensor [14 18].
On top of that, they're more efficient than standard lithium-ion batteries because bacteria can be packed together much more tightly.
Eventually the students scaled down that idea into something more feasible, though you would be forgiven if it still sounded like science fiction to you: they would build an electrical battery powered by bacteria.
One example was the relationship between the occurrence of salmonella and other zoonotic bacteria and free-living chicken vs. battery cages.
Recently, it was demonstrated that magnetite, owing to its mixed valency, can behave as a battery, being oxidized by phototrophic bacteria in the light and reduced by electrogenic bacteria in the dark [ 13].
One of its products uses special "electrogenic" bacteria to turn wastewater pools into batteries of sorts.
The World Health Organization is warning of the dangers posed by so-called superbugs, lethal bacteria that are immune to our current battery of antibiotics.
Bio-hydrometallurgical technologies use two strains of bacteria to leach Zn and Mn from spent batteries, after which soft magnetic ferrite is precipitated.
