Edible Electronics

but I'm willing to go with it quite literal. Not the mystical I was hoping not the mister mistical acts because the mystical acts is made of plastic, so if he was having someone sharpen it, that would probably go poorly for everyone involved. No, I think he's actually getting a full suit of male armor made. I would I would like that. I would appreciate. Oh, man, imagine if you were that in the studio. It would make so many interest noises. Yeah, the shuffling, Yeah, it's great, it

would be soothing. Yeah. Do you remember the time on this podcast. I'm pretty sure it was on this podcast in the past that we talked about crazy ants crazy. I very dimly remember that. I honestly don't remember what we recorded yesterday. There was some time when we were talking, I know about crazy ants that are these ants that are sort of known for getting into like you find

them inside your TV. Yeah, yeah, I remember reading all of these weird news stories about this a few months or maybe about a year back, when just these giant populations of ants were taking over people's electronics and so and so. The immediate assumption is, like, the ants are

eating my television. Why were they eating the TV? I don't know if they were actually eating the electronics, but they were at least attracted to the electronics or yeah, yeah, they were swarming inside electronics because you know, a they're they're nice dark places where they can nest and uh and like something about the electrical current I think it was, was was attractive to them and and then you would find yeah, yeah, and then you would find a lot

of dead ones in there, because you know, they would get zapped by the electrical current and just fill up the whole space with their bodies. That's pretty cool. Well, I wonder if those crazy ants that supposedly like to eat electronics were onto something because there has been a wave of interesting news in the technology world about edible electronics. But not like, not like edible electronics, like you're eating

them for sustenance. I mean, right, surely not, because I mean, really, it sounds like a kind of stupid idea to eat any electronics, right, I mean, they're expensive, more expensive than food. Usually, they're they're crunchy in ways that you don't want your food to be. They probably don't taste all that good to begin with. But let me give you a scenario in which you may in fact decide that you want to eat some electronics. I'll lay out the options for you. Okay,

let's say that, give me the menu. Yeah, you're you're going in for checkout with your doctor, and your doctor she looks over and she says, you know, just to be safe, I'm going to need to take a look at the inside of your lower g I tract and inspect the inner lining of your colon for polyps and cancer. Okay.

I can see many situations in which I would want to make sure I don't have cancer in my lower gas ro intestinal tract, right, And the obvious way of going about this is something you may very well be familiar with. Its tube endoscopy. We're also known as the colonoscopy. You're probably familiar with this procedure. It's a tube, it's got a camera on it. It's inserted into the colon, yeah, fed up along the lower tract of your intestine, and

allows the doctor to take a look around. And yes, a procedure like this could save your life, So if it's recommended by your doctor, it's worth getting. Probably go along with what they say to do totally, despite any perceived discomfort and embarrassment. But what if you had another option other than the tube. Let's say that your doctor says, okay, you can get the tube, or you can just take

a pill. And it works like this. You swallow a clear plastic capsule containing a camera and an LED, and this ingested imaging device can travel through your entire gi tract, taking thousands of pictures as it goes along, and then transmitting those pictures wirelessly to a receiver device worn on the outside of the body. Now, the crazy thing is this actually exists, and it's known as capsule indoscopy. For many patients, it is obviously a much less troubling proposition

than tube in discopy. Well, and it's also a hypothetically an outpatient treatment. When you go in for a colonoscopy, you have to like get an I V and get knocked out and spend you know, twenty four hours beforehand preparing. Although I had imagine that that you would also have to prepare for this kind of situation too. Yeah, somewhat, but it is obviously lower investment on your party. Not

having to put someone under anesthesia is always preferable. Yeah, So I'm not sure how much such a procedure stacks up against the imaging power of a traditional colonoscopy today. I found one study back from two thousand nine, so you know, that's like seven years ago now, crazy, Uh that that showed It showed back then traditional colonoscopy was more sensitive. So if your doctor recommends you go with

the two, best to do as they say. But let's say we just imagine a scenario where these su procedures are the same cost, equally effective, and you can get equally good imaging from either one. Who wouldn't go with the pill. Most people would go with the pill, right, So having a good capsule contained camera that can take pictures inside the body is one thing. Um, but as far as I'm aware, existing endoscopic capsule cameras are not meant to actually be digested. They're meant to pass all

the way through you. Uh, and then once they go outside the digestive system intact there you know you, yeah, you Typically you don't have to recover them. They'll transmit images to some kind of receiver and then you don't have to go phish it out. But if one word, to get stuck or damaged inside you, that would be a bad thing. You might need some surgery to get it removed. So these little pill machines might be considered

only semi edible. Sure, and and and right, you really don't want that capsule breaking open because most of the things that electronics are made of, and I kind of meant to mention this earlier, aren't good for you. Oh yeah, we'll talk about that in a minute. Yeah. But what if you could eat tiny electronic machines that could do work inside of you and then even potentially be digested and absorbed without causing any harm to your body. This

is the subject of today's episode. Yes, edible electronics. Edible electronics, So as weird as this sounds, it probably also sounds fairly futuristic, but it's not an entirely new concept. This isn't something that just showed up in the past few years. Oh yeah, and and every time that the that the science news media reports on it, it's like brand new,

but it's not. Um, well, okay, totally edible electronics don't exist yet, but the underlying research into them has been going on since at the very least, is the first that the earliest paper that I could find from an albeit brief search into uh ingestible electronics, which is kind of the precursor here. That's like that the capsule endoscope endoscopy, endoscopy,

endoscopy endoscopy. Great words it is, I love words. UM paper was a study of how the body reacts when weights are lifted in different ways, and uh in a swallowed sensor was measure pressure happening inside the abdomen during the study. So interesting, um I've seen I've seen other

Science News site. The nineteen seventies is the beginning of this kind of research, so it's a possibility that's been going on for longer than that, but definitely ingustable biosign trackers have been used in labs since nineteen uh and and ingustable biosign trackers have been commercially available since that is when a temperature sensor hit the market, which is useful for getting accurate readings on a subject's core body temperature when the subject is, you know, doing stuff and

not available to sit around with a thermometer in their mouth. Also, thermometers in the mouth are not necessarily the most accurate version of getting a subject's core body temperature, which can come in very handy when you're trying to do something like, say, prevent the injury of an athlete or an astronaut from

heat exhaustion and a heat stroke. The technology was actually developed by the Johns Hopkins You Diversity Applied Physics Lab and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center with with the specific goal of putting these capsules and astronauts when they go out on spacewalks and make sure that they're not overheating in their space suits. Okay, that's interesting, Yeah, it makes sense.

So that does sound like a like a highly specialized usage there, absolutely and even in the case of of competitive athletes, making sure that those that those people are not getting heat strokes as well is specialized. Many of us, I understand, are not competitive athletes. I know I'm not. Does competitive eating count? Are you competitive about eating? Have

you entered eating competitions? I do enter a kind of like frenzied state whenever I'm made to eat at my desk at work, because I'm afraid everybody can hear me chewing, and I just want to get it over with as fast as possible. I'm afraid that I I A. I sit next to Joe in the office. You guys, and uh and I've never heard you chew, so your relatively what have you heard meet to electronics because that can get you. Oh yeah, that's much crunch here. Okay, So

this kind of work has only been the beginning. Yeah, uh there, there's been a huge body of this kind of research, and we wanted to talk specifically about the work of one Christopher Bettinger, who has done just a lot of really great thought and writing about this. Yeah, he showed up on on this topic recently. So he's a Carnegie Melon professor, Christopher Beninger, and he's he's worked with the idea of edible electronics for a while now.

So he imagines, for instance, a sensor that you could swallow that would be able to monitor the state of your gut by looking at the state of your microbiome or checking for signs of g I problems like Crohn's disease or or bacterial infections in the gut, Or like you could take a pill that includes a machine that would monitor your uptake of an ingested medication and track how the drug is being absorbed by the body, or for example, like a pill that contains a measure the

drug payload and then monitors conditions or placement inside your body to selectively release specific amounts of medication based on based on information, not just a dumb dose, but a smart dose. Right, And hey, you know why stop at

swallowing electronics in order to improve healthcare outcomes. Motorola has spoken to the makers of an ingestible electronic pill about creating something that serves as an authenticator, So like, you don't need to remember a pass code anymore or carry around a ring of keys, because electronics around you, like your phone or your laptop of your car would all know who you are because of this electronic pill that

you ate. Oh, I think we've talked about this on the show before, because I remembered us talking about the cybersecurity of your personal waste, right, like, like, if there was a pill authentication form, could somebody use your poop to log in as you? They probably we could. That's a nice thought. But anyway, going on with the with the Bettinger's work, So so all those ideas, I just said that that makes sense that that'd be a cool

thing to have, But hold your equines. Now, most electronics, as we hinted at earlier, contain materials that would not be very friendly to the inside of your body, especially components like batteries, which often contain chemicals that are just intrinsically toxic. You don't want to menu. And if one of these toxic batteries get stuck in your GI tract

and does not pass through, this is a problem. Is the same thing we were talking about with the camera capsule earlier, Like it's fine if it just passes through as normal. If it were to get stuck or something that would be bad, you might need surgery. But this is why so people in this field have been looking towards ideas of using digestible or biodegradable materials to make these edible electronics out of like making the electronics themselves

inherently endly to your body. So Bettinger authored a review in a issue of Trends in Biotechnology called Materials Advances for Next Generation Ingestible Electronic Medical Devices. And in this review he sort of he points out a problem with many existing electronic devices meant to go inside the body. How do electronic implants get inside of you? While they get in through invasive surgeries, which is always something we should be trying to avoid if possible surgery comes with

a cost and a small risk to the patient. But once these things are inside the body, then they have to operate in what Beninger calls challenging micro environments. No joke will be the body, Yeah, I mean, essentially, the human body doesn't want stuff that isn't itself inside of itself. Yeah, generally not so then, of course, once they're in there, they can tend to cause bacterial infections and inflammation at

the implant site. And so advances in materials and strategies for fabricating electronic devices to go inside the body could help us avoid some of these problems. And ultimately he's focused on finding new strategies for creating quote packaging, circuit design, and onboard power supplies that are benign, non toxic, and even biodegradable. These also on like great ideas, but are there are there like category, can we break this down a little bit like like is there are are there

pathways we can take in order to get there? Yeah? He identifies sort of three major trends. One is miniaturization, So that is sort of self explanatory, but it's a trend toward devices and device components that are smaller but also use less power. And that's important because power once you get into extreme miniaturization of technology. Uh, as we've seen on the show plenty of times, power is very

often a concern. So you've got like little tiny robots that you want to you know, make into some kind of swarm that will that will go inside people and control their mind or whatever. We're usually researching, uh these things. One of the big problems with them is how do they talk to each other? And how do they how do they move? But yeah, where does their power come from?

Batteries are not the easiest part. Another trend he identifies is quote bioresorbable electronics, and that's this main thing towards UH increased knowledge about how to make electronics components out of materials that are transient and biodegradable rather than toxic and indigestible like most batteries and things like that are. And speaking of batteries, bio batteries is the last big trend.

He identifies non toxic biological materials that can serve as energy storage, and this is one of the keys to ingestable electronics. So let's go back to imagining these these devices that you could swallow. So here's one that might follow from Bettinger's ideas. The actual logic circuits in this electronic device are made out of silicon contained in some

sort of biodegradable envelope. Silicon's not gonna hurt you. Other components such as antennae or do we just say antenna's now when we're talking about electronics rather than insects, I think we might like idiots. Yeah, okay, I'm sorry, and

tenna's apologize on behalf of the language. Components like antenna's, they're made out of benign, relatively non toxic materials like maybe copper or magnesium, things that are technically essential nutrients in your body, and that could certainly be be worked into an electronic component in doses under the daily recommended value. Right, you're already consuming them. They're already in you. As long as you don't eat a just huge amount of them,

they're fine. So batteries again are one of the biggest questions. But Beninger has been working on this problem, and as of last year, I read news that his team had built a battery with an anode made out of manganese oxide, which is a normal, safe mineral found in the body. Another one of those, and a cathode made out of melanin, which is another thing naturally found in the body. It's a natural pigment, so you find it in hair and

skin and your eyeballs. Yeah, exactly. And in many cases the liquids inside the body, such as gastric fluid itself, can be perfectly able to function as the electrolyte solution through which current flows between the cathode and the Anna. Oh oh, that's exciting. So it's it's like an open battery system that sounds either exciting or bad. I'm I

think it's pretty cool, Okay, alright, cool, excellent. I'm worried I'm I'm picturing I'm picturing what is probably not the scientific case of just of just your whole stomach, like like zapping you continually until the battery runs down. Well, fortunately these batteries are not capable of that much power, and it seems like they're going to be capable of only a little bit of power, just enough to make

it work. Right. Ah, yeah, that that's right. I did read a figure in which the battery, this type of battery provided five milliwotts of power for for up to twenty hours. And and that twenty hour kind of figure is a good goal post that they're looking for, because that's about as long as it takes for something to move from your mouth out through your other end. So so that's that's a good hallmark of how long a battery like this should should last for an endoscopic camera. Um,

and it's it could probably, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it could quite power an endoscopic camera. Yet it's certainly not enough to like power your smartphone. I really love reading the work that Bedinger has been been doing about all of this. It's it's really forward thinking. I feel like we should have some kind of sound cue whenever we mentioned the show's title in the episode.

But UM's, yeah, it's it's it's really it's really interesting, um and and looking towards the future, but but also absolutely describing a lot of what's already going on, Like there's so many laboratory studies that I ran across while we were doing this research that are using these principles in order to to make stuff that people can swallow for laboratory studies. It's it's it's great. And I and I had no idea that any of this was going

on before we went into this. I love I love it when I am surprised by all of the science going on in our world. It's strange. Yeah, you'd think you'd hear about people eating electronics, you would, You just don't. Huh, Well, I got another one. Is pretty weird about this? How about eating origami robots or what? Okay, okay, I can I can start. It sounds laughable at first, but then you think or Agby is nice and folded up and and sometimes sharp corners pokey the inside of me. Right,

No that's not no, that's not the point. Um no, but it could probably unfold and do stuff in your body. Yeahah, exactly. So we we've talked about the research of m I T computer scientists Dan yellow Russ on the show before. Yeah, and she she's known for these robots or her group has been doing some really interesting investigation of the concept

of edible electronic technology. So for a while now, Ruce and her people have been working on these things, these origami robots, shape shifting robots that can assemble themselves and

assume different morphologies when subjected to a stimulus. For example, you have a flat piece of plastic or layered material that you produced by three D printing or laser cutting, and then when that material is subjected to some kind of stimulus, say it's baked at a certain temperature, or connected to batteries or submerged in water or something like that,

it will naturally fold into programmed shapes and configurations. Sometimes it can even fold itself in a way that causes movement, like the oregomy robot can bend itself in such a way that it crawls or swims. Well, yeah, and this is totally we We did an episode a long time ago about for D printing, and this is the idea behind all of that. Yeah, yeah, similar ideas definitely, Uh, So how does it do this? Well? How? How how would you have something that crawls just by bending? Uh?

Like several of Rus's robots, this robot has several layers of material. So it has a middle layer of material that shrinks or expands in response to temperature, and then scoring on the outer layers of the material determines what shapes the material bends into when the middle layer shrinks. But so in so so, how does this come into entering the body? Why would you put one of these

in your mouth? Well? In the most recent research, scientists from this m I T Group and the University of Sheffield and Tokyo Tech teamed up to test an origami robot meant for the inside of the body in a simulated esophagus and stomach. So one of the challenges here is being able to make this bending, gut swimming robot

out of bio safe materials. Right in the end, uh they used this biodegradable plastic film for the shrinking middle layer, and that is known as bio lephon, and then that's the part that contracts and empowers the movement, and then the structural material, the outer material was made out of dehydrated pig intestine a k a. The natural casing in

your sausage. Yeah yeah, that sounds really gross right up until you think about how delicious sausages are and you know that crispy coating on the outside natural pig intestine, that's right. Oh yeah, so it's one of my favorite things. On your charcuterie board. There may be a robot, especially prepared by your chef for you for your stomach purposes. But what would it do? Why would you want a biodegradable origami robot crawling around inside your body made of

dehydrated pin intestine partially? Yeah. So let's say you accidentally swallow a watch battery like you do sometimes. Maybe stuff happens, cut your bowl of peanuts right next to your bowl of batteries, and you can't take your eyes off the season finale of The Bachelor. Oh my god, what are they gonna say next? And so you accidentally tossed down a fistful of toxic battery discs. This is something, this

is something that's happened in your house before. Yeah. No, I can't say that that I've ever watched The Bachelor. I have eaten batteries and sometimes, uh it's crazy, but apparently I've read that this happens around thirty times a year in the United States. I think primarily in young children who don't know better than to not eat batteries.

Is candy pretty much? Sure, I mean they're shiny. Uh So here I have no choice but to read a truly sublime quote from the m I T News feature on this research quote chu Hey, And this is one of the researchers. Shouy bought a piece of ham, and he put the battery on the ham. Ruce says, within half an hour, the battery was fully submerged in the ham. Submerged, submerged in the ham. So that made me realize that, yes, this is important. If you have a battery in your body,

you really wanted out as soon as possible. That's Danielle Rous speaking. Submerged in the hand, submerged in the ham, and she is one correct that has convinced me and emerged in the ham. Get that out of me. If it can do that to ham, think about what it's going to do to my squishy inside exactly. This is a reflection of the fact that swallowed batteries or other dangerous objects can burn into the walls of the stomach

and there hilarious. It's not funny, it's very tragic. Well, you need to have some way of getting this thing out of the body. You've got to be able to get in and remove it. And so here's where the origami robot comes in. Okay, how does the origami robot save the day? So you swallow a capsule and in the research, this is just a piece of ice with the robot folded up and frozen and side so it's like a piece of ice capsule. It might be a different kind of thing if you were to actually have

something like this in a hospital. But you swallow it, the capsule opens up inside your stomach and then releases the tiny robot, and then the tiny robot can use

its bending motion to move around inside the body. Now somebody on the outside then uses controlled magnetic fields to direct the motion of the robot, and then the robot moves to the foreign object, maybe the battery that submerged in the ham inside your stomach, and then it attaches to the battery, lifts it out of the tissue where it's become embedded, and then from there the robot and the foreign object can be safely passed on through the

digestive system. I can't believe that we've gotten this far in the episode so far without mentioning um Martin Short and the amazing film Inner Space. You know, I think I've actually never seen that, though I've talked about it on the podcast before. Yeah, I think I there used to be a ride at Epcot Center that had something to do with all of this. There was one going Inside the Body movie that was serious, and then I think one that was a comedy. Right. I think the

one I'm talking about was the comedy. I don't think Martin Short does that many serious films that could be wrong. I and checked up on him in a while. I'm gonna feel really bad if he's dead. I'm not sure. No, he's doing great. Oh oh okay, I'm I'm very much relieved. Okay, Well, hey,

how any other edible electronics you want to tell me about, Lauren. Yes, one bit of research that we saw that, the bit that inspired this episode to begin with, actually is about a truly edible electronic component, like digestible, like made out of food, so not just something that can be digested and it's fine. It's something that is meant to be digested, that is mostly entirely meant to be digested. Yes, okay.

So in May of twenty sixteen, a team out of Arizona State University published a paper in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies about their lab testing of a super capacitor made out of food products. Super Capacitors are a type of like short term energy storage that can be used to deliver little jolts of power. Um, it's it's it's a battery type component. It's not as powerful as a battery would be, but it's good in certain situations that

you don't want to send a battery into necessarily. And uh yeah, the team the team used a simulated human stomach to uh to test these devices in and they managed to successfully zap and kill some E. Coli bacteria. Pretty cool, and also to power and LED and also to power and endoscopic camera, so that was pretty cool for about three minutes. After three minutes, the device was digested by the artificial gastric fluid. But so how did they do it? Good question? What was their recipe? Was

it anything like the ones we've seen already? No? Uh no, Pagan testines at all. Uh well, okay, they experimented with a bunch of different food stuffs. Pagan testines may have been involved, but they settled on a sandwich kind of thing. Okay. So it was a combination of gelatine and cheddar cheese as a protective casing. Um. Some the electrodes were made out of devated charcoal, which is a stuff that's available in dietary supplements. People take those those anti hangover pills.

People take something like that. Uh So yeah, I activated charcoal bound with egg whites and then dried where the electrode layers. This sounds like Body Builder. The electrodes were separated by a sheet of seaweed which was soaked in the electro light, which was gatorade or a Bonster energy drink. Um. So, so ions from the liquid electrolyte could flow through the sheet of seaweed because she seaweed is you know, permeable, uh,

therefore creating a current. But the seaweed is solid enough to prevent the electrodes from making contact with each other. And then sheets of gold leaf, which are used as decoration and high end pastry and sometimes an Indian food, served as the current. Collectors to make the whole thing viable. So so they built these devices up like a like like teeny little lasagnia ravioli is kind of the little little sandwiches. Um, moving from the outside to the center.

It was gelatin sheet, cheddar cheese, gold leaf egg and charcoal stuff electric like soaked seaweed, and then out again in the opposite order, a little sandwich and the whole thing. Each of the devices, uh is a little square, like a little bit larger than the size of a soy sauce packet. And according to the studies principal investigator hen King Jong, it tastes like cheese. What kind of cheese

cheddar cheese? Yeah? I mean and actually actually the straight the straight quote from Arizona State University from from its press release about this whole thing is even better than just to taste like cheese. The quote is asked what the combination tastes like, Jong replied, it is cheese. It is cheese. I thought I thought you'd like that in particular too. Um. But but if you're worried that this

isn't like weird enough, worry not. They experimented with all kinds of other strange ingredients when coming up with this recipe. A few small examples MSG barbecue sauce, jello, and gummy candies. Boy ah, in that same I'm going to object to. So you've listed a lot of foods talking about this, and I don't know if I consider all of them fully edible. You've named Monster Energy drinks. Uh, gummy candy?

Is MSG a food? It's a food additive product. It's made of salt, It's made of a lot of solid accent. Is that accent stuff that used to be in people's grandparents? Oh, I have I have no idea. I don't think i've heard of that. I missed the accent days. I remember thinking it was just pure MSG. It could be wrong. It's a possibility. And n SG is real tasty. I don't get headaches from it. I consider myself very lucky.

In that press release, Jong also said that he had a hard time getting the university to reimburse his lab receipts at first, because they like just they were like, you're just out there throwing parties. We're not going to reimburse your party receipts for all this barbecue sauce and Monster Energy Drink and seaweed sheets. If those are the

things that anyone is using to throw a party. By the way, Arizona State University, I don't just give it to of them like they're they're honestly not living on a lot. So the chemistry, yeah, yeah, all of that aside. They they're continuing their research. They hope to improve the gelatine casing in order to make future iterations of these devices last longer in the digestive tract than three minutes.

Longer than three minutes would be pretty pretty useful. They also want to make it smaller by using a three D printer to do the manufacturing work rather than making them by hand. And furthermore, they're they're working on a wireless charging system that would let them re charge the device or you know, assuming that the device lasted longer than three minutes, remotely while the device is inside a human body HM. Which is one of the cool things

about super capacitors. You can you can recharge them and have them release that charge many much multiple times more easily than many rechargeable batteries. Yeah. Cool, pretty cool. This is quite strange. It is, and and it's terrific because it's it's kind of got a handle on that battery leg of the of the research stool that we're working. Oh, I'm just not Maybe I shouldn't use the word stool

when we're already making lots of metaphors about colo. That's a good one stool because if you know, stool is three legged, one wobble and nice and stable. And there were there were two other legs which I am mostly forgetting about. And it it suggests a platform on which future research can be built. Absolutely, yeah, And you know, Okay, so I think that actually this this battery concept, like making a traditional anode cathode battery out of food, might

be a little bit more complicated. But but supercapacitors are are great in this because they're they're really quite simple devices relatively speaking, that only need to do like basic chemical work. So they're pretty good candidates for being made out of edible stuff because edible stuff does chemical work. Anyway. Now, I'm sure there are a lot of other components in the electronics that you can make out of stuff that won't hurt you, but you probably can't make out of

like food, food, actual food. Yeah, Like you're not going to like get like some popcorn and like turn it into a circuit. Probably, I don't know that much about popcorn or about circuits, if we're being super honest, But yeah, so so like, well, will we ever be able to build a camera out of food or radio antenna or a radio emitter? Mm hmmm, how long until there's an

edible phone? Never give me an edible phone. I would definitely be hungry, like in the middle of the night and like like going to bed and would just eat it and then I and I wouldn't wake up in the morning because my alarm clock is my phone. Everything would be terrible. It would also be unsanitary because you know everybody takes their phone out when they go into the bathroom. Okay, no edible phones. That that is not

the future of edible electronics. Okay, So I'm going to steal an idea from a random internet comment I saw here. Here's the thing, Okay, is this the future of edible electronics? Comment or wisdom? Put GPS trackers in foods that you fear maybe stolen, and if somebody yanks your lunch out of the fridge at work and eats it without your consent, you can track them down and get that lunch back. I'm not sure if I would want to get the

lunch back. Well, it might be expensive electronics there if it's worth it, Uh, no matter what, I like, like making any I mean, even if, even if we never come around to a point where our laptops are made out of edible stuff. Uh. This this sounding more and

more like Willy Wonka. Even if we never get to that point, any kind of process that's going to make devices safer, that that are going into bodies, that are helping patients, uh, that that are helping doctors help patients, you know, get over terrible diseases or find their cancer or whatever it is, that's great. Yeah, I think we don't need to dream up any extra weird ways to use edible electronics on top of the things that have

already been suggested by the researchers themselves. I mean, being able to have something that's a safer option for internal imaging or something that could retrieve foreign objects from the inside of the body. I mean that alone is a very worthwhile thing to research. So more power to the Yeah, I did not I didn't know anything about anything getting submerged in ham before this, and now I'm very concerned

about it. So I'm real glad that people are working on it, and I think I think that that's just about all that we have to say about edible electronics today. Yeah, so wrapping this up, Hey, what do you guys think about all this? Do you have a wacky edible electronic that you would like to propose to us? We want to hear about it if if there's one that we particularly enjoy, we will let we will let the rest of the podcast audience know about it out loud with

our voices. So send those in. You can send those into our email address. It is FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. You can visit us on Twitter or Facebook. Our handles in both of those places are also, strangely enough, FW Thinking. You can also visit our website if you'd like to. We have a whole series of videos. Do you guys know about those? Joe and I write for them. Jonathan right sometimes he's the host of all of them. They're great. They're produced by this guy named

Dan Bush, who's really nice has an adorable baby. So go check those out, and uh, we hope to hear from you. Either way, you will hear from us again very soon for more on this topic and the future of technology. I'll visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places