STBYM: Electric Microbe Land

too long ago. Yeah, so yeah again. Originally this one was a Summer of ten, but we're giving it to you again on the very last day of of So let's have a listen. Enjoy this regifting Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radios. How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Can we figured we'd start off today talking about our favorite

electricity monsters. Robert, what's your favorite electricity monster? Oh? You know, my, my, my, just gut instinct answers to go with Blanca from Street Fighter. You know, he's the green skinned and I was, I was. I looked into this a little bit. I was never sure why he had green skin. Apparently some alleged backstory

involving chlorophyll um, but I don't know. He ends up with he's like a beast creature, a beast man with green skin and like bright orange hair, wearing board shorts, wearing board shorts and just kind of doing this this, this kind of hulking uh pose bent over, and then he can produce electricity. Basically has the powers since he's kind kind of a you know, on amlogum of various Amazonian things. He has the powers of an electric eagle, and so he can shock his opponents that way. That's

a good one. Uh. There there are a few really good electricity movies. By really good, I mean really bad from the nineteen eighties and nine indies. Did you ever see the Pulse? I don't think I ever did. I think there was another horror movie called Pulse, which was about something else. So this one was about. Uh It's like some family living in a house and like a regular suburban neighborhood in California in the nineteen eighties, and an evil burst of electricity goes throughout goes out through

the mains. Uh. I don't remember if there's like an evil storm or like an alien arrives or something. But for some reason, there's this pulse of of killer electricity and it goes into their house and it turns all the appliances against them, so the TV starts trying to kill them and everything, a real maximum over drive scenario, but it's like it's sold as like the the malevolence is delivered directly through the electrical wires the wrong voltage

or something. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, I was thinking about this, like, what are some other examples of electric creatures or humanoids? And I mean, obviously I thought of of of electric Christopher Lambert from from Mortal Calm that

another fighting game. Yeah, but but so many, So often is the case you see individuals with some sort of pyrotechnic mobility, you know, Like one of a film that we've talked about before has been the Toby Hooper film, in which Brad Dorriff played a like a pyromaniac who could catch things on fire with his brain. He's got like like pyro kinesis, but he doesn't want it. He's not like a you know, a villain out there like Piro and the X Men just throwing fireballs wherever he wants.

It's more like every he's kind of like the Hulk. He's like fire Hulk. Every time he gets upset, he starts catching things on fire. But he also like burns the heck out of himself too, which wasn't a nice twist. And of course Brad Dorriff is wonderful and in that film there are at least portions of it where he's it's it's a rare film or Brad Dorriff is the lead and he's sort of playing a regular human in

some of the scenes. So it's interesting to see. But but so often is the case you see fire based powers in these characters and creatures as opposed to electric based powers. And it's kind of weird when you think about it, because, as we'll discussing this episode, electricity is

more tied in with biology than fire. And even from the human perspective perspective, you know who among us has not harnessed the power of electricity by by walking across a carpeted floor in the wintertime and then shocking somebody with a touch. You do that on purpose? I have in the past done it on purpose. Yes, yeah, but

it's pretty not announce of guilt on your face. Well, one of one of the things I do like to do when it gets cold, when the conditions are just right, have my son go down a curly slide, build up static electricity, and then give me a high five on the way down. And at times it has been stiff enough to like leave a numbness in my hand when you feel it in your wrist, kind of in the bone. Creepy, real shocking power. I don't know if there's ever been

like an actually really scar airy electricity monster movie. The other main one I was thinking of is one of my favorite cheesy, mid mid career West Craven movies, which is Shocker. I think that's from nineteen or so and it's gotten Mitch Peleggi or Poleggie, the guy who plays Skinner on the X Files. Uh. He plays the villain. He's like a serial killer who does some like evil black magic ritual to turn himself into electricity after he

gets killed in the electric chair. That's right. I remember saying I never saw it, but I remember seeing the boxes for it, and he's in an electric chair on the You should see it sometime. It's a laugh riot, and he's, oh, he's just like acting, I mean beat galaxies beyond normal levels of acting. Is uh would you say it's an electric performance? I would say he is

a live wire. But yeah, so I think you're right about the idea that maybe electric monsters should be more biologically intuitive than pyrokinetic or fire throwing monsters or even fire breathing wagons, because you know, it shouldn't come as any surprise that the use of electricity by living organisms predates the technological uses predates you know, Tesla and medicine or even Franklin and Galvani and all that. Like, all

kinds of animals use electricity in various ways. Now they're they're really noticeable charismatic uses of electricity, like how sharks and rays have electric sensory organs known as the ampullae of Lorenzini, which they used to sense very faint electric currents transmitted through water by potential prey animals. And then you've got the electrogenic organisms that like generally aquatic organisms that emit strong electric currents maybe just stun prey or

two deploys a defensive weapon. And these would include things like electric fish, electric catfish and rays. Yeah. Yeah, the electric eel is certainly the electric animal par excellence. Uh, though it's always worth reminding everyone, and it's not really an eel. It has more it's more related to a catfish. Oh, I don't think I knew that. Well, I didn't know they were electric catfish, but I didn't know the eel

was one. Right, Yeah, I mean you look at it if you' you know, fortunate enough to see one in a tank somewhere or in the wild. Uh, you know, you're gonna notice that it doesn't really look like an eel. It's uh, it's it's it's a very curious looking creature. Have you ever seen a de fleshed eel skull? Oh? I don't know that I have. It is one of them. Is usually don't leave them on when I go. You should.

You should look up an eel skull. Sometimes it might be different for different species, but at least some eel skulls are like the most metal thing in nature. It's amazing. But anyway, we today we wanted to to think about electric organisms. But instead of focusing on these larger organisms that use electricity maybe in a sensory capacity or as

a weapon of some sort. We wanted to go down to zoom in with the microscope and to take a look at the world of micro organisms that deal in the currency of the Holy fire, the amber, the electricity. So I just wanted to start by saying by giving a shout out that I got the idea to do this episode after I read a really interesting article a couple of weeks ago in the New York Times by previous stuff to blow your mind. Guest Carl Zimmer, Oh, yes, yeah,

that was a tremendous episode. It was great to chatting with him. I'd love to have him back on the show. Sometimes we should see about that. If we're getting back on the show, then he becomes a friend of the show. That's the way it works two appearances. Two appearances make you a friend of the show. So just one is previous. Guest. I almost said friend of the show, but I didn't want to presume. I think those are the rules. Yes, uh so, of course. Electricity. You know, it's generally thought

of as the flow of electrons. You might have other ways of defining it. You could maybe define it other ways in terms of electrical potential, like a positive or negative charge, but Generally, if you've got current, if you've got electrons flowing that, you think of that as some form of electricity. And there are ways in which the metabolism of our bodies could be considered electric. For example,

what is actually happening when we breathe. I don't know if I've ever thought of it quite this way before, but I was reading an article in New Scientists from July which quotes the u c l A microbiologists Kenneth Nielsen in characterizing the most basic biochemistry of life as a flow of electrons. So basically, think about it like this.

You eat carbon based compounds, you take in that chemical energy, and that's gonna be molecules like sugars, and these molecules, these carbon based compounds like sugars, have excess electrons, and then cells in the body break down those compounds and they pass on the extra electrons through a series of chemical reactions that power the body, and part by making a dinascene triphosphate or a t P, which is the chemical energy transport molecule that that captures the energy obtained

through the breakdown of food, and then he uses it to power things that happen inside ourselves. I've I've sometimes seen a TP characterized as an energy storage molecule, but that's not quite right. That would be more like fats or sugars or something. A TP is like, it's like a car for energy, you know, it carries it from one place to another in the cell. And apparently the flow of electrons is an indispensable part of making that

a TP that powers our cells. But eventually the extra electrons, since they're flowing, they've got to go somewhere at the end of this chain of chemical reactions. You can't just keep building up extra electrons in the body until you become a humanliding jar or you become the guy from Shocker and you just electrocute people by touching them. So you have to pass on the electrons onto a molecule that will accept them. And in our case, that molecule

is oxygen. You breathe in the oxygen, and that oxygen we breathe in goes around to the body, to the cells, and it accepts those extra electrons that are the waste product of our metabolism. Uh and it bonds with carbon molecules, and then you breathe out this waste product as CEO two And to quote from this researcher Kenneth Nielsen, as as quoted in in New Scientist, that's the way we make all our energy, and it's the same for every organism on this planet. Electrons must flow in order for

energy to be gained. This is why when someone suffocates another person, they're dead within minutes. You have stopped the supply of oxygen, so the electrons can no longer flow. So choking somebody is kind of like it's like putting a resistor in the electric circuit. That's interesting. I mean, this is all getting down to the fact that we're

all essentially bioelectric organisms. Yeah, that's exactly right, and it's not just us, Like this is basically the rule for all kinds of life forms, from humans to coconut crabs to lots of single celled organisms. Pretty much every organism needs to create an electron flow by taking in food with excess electrons and then running that through a series of chemical reactions to extract usable energy for cells, and then dumping those electrons out into some kind of electron

accepting waste bucket like oxygen molecules. And this is even true for bacteria where from any species, oxygen must be present as this terminal receptor for the electrons at the end of the metabolic line. But there are some prokaryotic organisms, single celled organisms that can't or don't use oxygen, and these are known as anaerobic bacteria, and they live in places where oxygen doesn't reach or where oxygen is very limited.

And the examples of this might be places like deep in the sediment along a river, or buried in a sea bed, or even ever a deep underground in oil wells. I mean, try to imagine that that far underground, that like life is thriving in some way. We've also talked about them thriving in some human created sewer environments. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah, all all these environments, especially these environments that are cut off from the surface by by mud or sediment or

even by vast expanses of dead rock. So if the electrons have to flow for life to go on, how do these anaerobic bacteria survive without oxygen molecules to accept the excess electrons at the end of the metabolism and basically to breathe out. How you know, where do the electrons go when they're done? With them. So here's where

we get to a bacterial discovery story. So in the mid nineteen eighties, I think around nine seven, the American microbiologist Derek Lovely was out pulling up samples of sediment from the Potomac River. And one of these samples from the Potomac River, it was around Washington, d C. Contained one of these weird single celled organisms. It was a bacterium called geo bacter metalla reducens. And like other bacteria, this bacterium would begin the electron flow of its metabolism

by consuming organic compounds that had excess electrons. For example, ethanol, which is alcohol. So there's some ethanol in its environment. It can eat that, but it would end its metabolism by passing the excess electrons off into iron oxides, which are rust So this is a life form that can survive by eating grain, alcohol and breathing out rusty iron. Yeah. I've read and Lovely some of some of his papers that when they're working within the lab, they essentially just

feeded vinegar. Yeah, that that's that's all it requires. Wow, So if you have to breathe out into rusty iron, would you rather survive by eating only grain alcohol or by eating only vinegar. Um. I feel like vinegar from for me, vinegar would probably be healthier for you for men is my personal choice, but I am I'm not

a microbe. So just as an interesting side note, in this process, the bacteria, Carl Zimmer notes the sent this article to bacteria help transform the regular old iron oxides the rust particles in their environment into the naturally fair magnetic mineral known as magnetite. So that's like, you know, the strong natural magnetic rock you might find in sediments or around the world, and these bacteria helped produce that magnetite by by by pushing off these electrons into it,

which sort of magnetizes it. Now we've been speaking kind of metaphorically by calling this bacterial process breathing, because it's not breathing in the exact same way we do. Like the bacteria don't have respiratory systems with lungs and alveola and all that. We breathe by sucking in oxygen and then transporting it around our bodies to the cells where it needs to go, and then breathing out the molecular waste products of our metabolism through the same gas exchange

system in the lungs. But the bacteria don't have lungs. They don't suck rust particles into the body to allow the electrons to attach to them. Uh, and so what's going on there? Like according to Carl Zimmer's article, it took Lovely and his colleague Dr John Stolts in their labs years to figure out how this respiration process was taking place. And what they discovered was that instead of like sucking in the rust particles and breathing them out,

geobacter exhaled by putting out electric wires. Yeah, this is amazing. And of course when we're saying wires, we're talking about microfilaments. Yeah, but they do, in a way function like electric wires. I mean, they're they're conductive. They are long, filamentous kind of conductive material that is there to transmit a flow

of electrons between potentials. So you've got to build up of electrons as a waste product in the bacterium, and then you've got a lower potential thing out there that can accept them, like maybe a deposit of iron oxide, and you pump the electrons out through this wire to the iron oxide outside the cell. Yeah, and we're these things are tiny too. We're talking about like three nanometers

in diameter. Yeah, extremely too. Though they can get pretty long without Yeah, we can get pretty long in some cases some cases. And then we'll get into other species later. But there are species with with with a filaments. Yeah. Uh So, when you're a geobacter and you since the presence of iron oxide and your surroundings, basically what it seems like you do is you sprout out these microscopic little filaments, each one known as a pealis plural peely

and bacterial peely. Are fascinating in other respects too, because, for one thing, they play a role in the bacterial process known as horizontal gene transfer. And we've done a podcast on this before. This is a really interesting phenomenon. Basically, bacteria they don't have sex in the way that like sexually reproducing eukaryotic animals do. Write they reproduce a sexually, meaning they make exact copies of themselves in a process

called binary fission. They split off and create two daughter cells, not by mating with other individuals and combining their DNA to create an ad mixed offspring. But despite this, despite them not having sexual reproduction. Bacteria do engage in something kind of like sex, and this is this process of horizontal gene transfer where bacteria can meet up and share

genetic material between one another. And this doesn't always work out great for us, because, for example, it is one of the main methods by which bacteria acquire DNA for antibiotic resistance. We just did an episode of our other podcast, Invention, about the invention of antibiotics and antibiotics are you know, a miraculous invention of the twentieth century. But one of the big problems with them is that over time, the

diseases that we're fighting get better at overcoming these medicines. Yeah, I think. I think the way we put it in that episode is with with penicillin and another antibiotics, we're we're stealing a weapon from the you know, the eons old war between fungi and bacterium and uh, and we've stole the weapon, but the but the war continues on

and the the the the evolution of their warfare continues. Yeah, and in the way we use the fungal weapon sort of accelerates the arms race, like provoked, it's in a Cold War style like provokes the other side to uh make go with a with a build up, you know, an arms build up, when that seems to be what's happening on the bacterial side. Now we stole like a fungal catapult, but now we're quickly advancing into the age of where a fungal tribute SHA would be a more

appropriate That's right. We have to find those those fungal tributes or develop them ourselves. I hope we do. But for the but for the bacteria to share their own tribute shape plans. What one of the things they do

is this horizontal gene transfer process. Specifically this process known as conjugation, where to bacteria meet up and they're like, let's hook up, and they extend a PEALSS between the donor bacterium and the recipient bacterium and this little hair like filament hooks them together so they can share plasmids, which are little segments of DNA and peely also enhanced the virulence of bacteria by helping them bind two cells

in the host body. And this is the case in disease causing strains of bacteria like strepped A caucus or an E. Coli. The pelists can kind of hook them onto the cells lining your the inside of your throat or in your gut, or wherever it is they're trying

to infect. But in the case of Geobacter, the researchers who worked with Geobacter originally concluded that the peely we're being used for another purpose entirely, and that purpose was the off routing of electricity into electro receptive molecules in

the environment. So to picture this as again, this is going to be a very crude metaphor, but imagine if you were to breathe instead of by sucking oxygen into your lungs and exhaling CEO two, by shooting electric wires out of your mouths into the environment, which would then attack hatch to the toaster and the TV and pour waste electricity out of your lungs into those appliances. Oh, that's pretty good. That sounds like a good electric alien creature for a future film or a pass film, I

mean movies done. Yeah, I mean I can imagine Dan Ackroyd playing a character that does this, uh, you know, back in the nineties or so. Oh, you know, they're one of those nineties like a kind of grimy computer monster movies. What was that one that Jamie Lee Curtis was in about like a killer computer virus that like just puts gross wires everywhere. Oh yeah, this was I think Donald Sutherland was in it. Yeah, it's not a

ship or something. It was really bad. It was like a sort of it was kind of a take on the thing, but with this this cybernetic blend of like wires and flesh. Uh yeah, yeah, it's like a computer virus that decides that Earth is that the humans are a pathogen and virus. I think you're a pathogeny. It's

called virus. Yeah, And I should notice a As a follow up to what I was just saying about the bacterial peely, it's not fully settled whether the Geobacter actually use peely as their electric wires, or whether they use

peely exclusively. Karl Zimmer's article notes that the Yale physicist and Nikkil S. Malvankar and colleagues believe that instead the bacteria use dedicated wires made out of organic compounds called cytochromes, but the fact that Geobacter does pump electrons out through biological wires of some sort doesn't seem to be in dispute. It's just their different ideas about to what extent they're

using different structures as the wires. All right, on that note, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Than alright, we're back. So we've been talking about the idea of electroactive bacteria, bacteria that in some metaphorical since breathe by releasing excess electrons that are the the end product of their metabolism into uh things in

their environment, like little deposits of iron oxide. And they do this by sticking these wires out of their cells that that connect to things, and they can pump the

electricity out through those wires. But it doesn't stop there because researchers have also discovered that in some cases, the electric wires put out by metal reducing bacteria like Geobacter would not just go out into iron oxide in the environment or into other metals in the environment, but sometimes these wires would go out and connect to other species of electroactive bacteria. And so the same way that Geobacter metaphorically breathes by putting out electron flow, some species of

bacteria can metaphorically eat by taking in electron flow. And this energy intake allows the bacteria to convert carbon dioxide into methane, kind of like how plants use direct energy from the sunlight to how or the chemical reaction that turns carbon dioxide from the air into the sugars and the carbon compounds that make up the bodies of plants. When I'm sure if said in a million times on the show, but one of my favorite crazy facts about

plants is they make their bodies from the air. They don't make their bodies from you know, the dirt or something, and that that it's it's the carbon from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that becomes the wood beings of air and sun basically totally well and to be fair and like water from the ground and other minerals and stuff,

but primarily, yes, primarily of air and sun. So yeah, So if these bacterial species that that do this, if they pair up, they can form these like cross networks of underground bacterial wires where one species feeds another with

its waist electricity. So I was reading a BBC article on electroactive bacteria by an author named Jasmine Fox Skelly, and this article mentioned that it was not long after loveliest discovery of the electrical properties of Geobacter that the u c l A microbiologist Kenneth Nielsen, who was quoted in that article earlier describing all of you know, the respiration of life is the flow of electrons before Nielsen found another electronic screening bacterium, this one in the Oneida

Lake of New York State and published his findings in the journal Science. And this was a very similar story, except the bacterium here was not geobacter. It was shoe and Ella on identis uh and and much the same way that the geobacter metaphorically breathes iron oxide, this bacterium breathe this oxygen when it's available, but when it's not, it breathes manganese oxide, pumping electrons out into the external deposits of the compound, though it can also pump electrons

out into other metals like iron but um. Unlike Geobacter, which uses some form of wire to canuct electricity, quote, she and Ella appears to shuttle electrons out of their cells using transport molecules called flavians and stepping stone proteins embedded in the outer membrane called cytochromes. So there we've got this cytochromes being involved again. So we're starting to build up a picture that there are many different ways for bacteria to kind of breathe electrically or be electro

active in one way or another. And these tend to be bacteria that that don't have access to air, or don't or only do this win they don't have access to air, and so so Carl Zimmer's article also discusses the work of Danish microbiologist Lars Peter Nielsen. And this is a different spelling of Nils different Nielson. You know, this is a two Nielsen night, but it's once an in e A L and one's an in I E L. Personally, no offense to the other guy, but I'm more of an inn I E L kind of guy. Yeah, it

stands out a little bit more so. This guy, l Is Peter Nielsen, discovered an electrical bacterial ecosystem within the mud from the Bay of our Hoosts. I hope I'm saying that right. It's a coastal area on the western side of the main peninsula of Denmarks are roos A A R h U s. So basically, within a core of mud sample here, you'd have bacteria lower down down in the mud with anaerobic metabolism. Again, that means oxygen free.

They don't need oxygen to live, and they would produce hydrogen sulfide is a waste product of their way of life. And hydrogen sulfide we've talked about, I'm sure plenty of times on the show before. It's a it's a poisonous gas that smells like rotten eggs. It's just like it's bad stuff. It smells like death. You'd commonly find it in places where biological material is being decomposed in the

absence of oxygen, so again anaerobic decomposition. Like you will smell this stuff wafting up out of swamps and out of sewers and stuff like that. It was one of the bye products that people had to protect their faces from when they went down to fight the soap dragon fat. Yeah. The fact, I don't know why I said protect their faces. I mean like wear gas maths, right, I don't mean like it's going to hurt their faces out at them

and try to attachs. It's like the face hugger U No, No, like it's like you don't want to breathe it um now, of course, in order for you to smell hydrogen sulfide. In order to smell this nasty bacterial byproduct in a mar Shura sewer, the gas has to bubble up to the surface and waft out right. But Nielsen noticed that it wasn't doing that in this mud. Something was consuming this poisonous waste product before it buoyed up to the

surface of the mud and escaped. But as Karl Zimmer writes in his article, if other bacteria below we're breaking down this hydrogen sulfide without oxygen to aid in the metabolic process, again, you would have an unacceptable build up of electrons, and so this excess electricity would have to go somewhere. And what they found is exactly what you might guess. The bacteria were extending biological electric wires built out of thousands of cells surrounded by a conductive protein sheath.

Uh kind of like the you know, the sheath you might see on a copper wire to protect it, except it's the other way around. In this case. The sheath is what's conducting the electricity. So it's kind of like if you had like plastic surrounded by copper. I guess which would be a bad design. For a wire, but it works in this case, and these wires are known

as cable bacteria. The cable bacteria allow the waste electricity to flow out to the surface, and once the electrons reach the surface, there you've got surface bacteria which have access to oxygen, unlike the bacteria below because they're on the surface of course. So these bacteria use the electricity to cause a chemical reaction between oxygen and hydrogen, the waste product of which is water and quote from Karl's

article quote and cable bacteria grow to astonishing densities. One square inch of sediment may contain as much as eight miles of cables. Dr Nielsen eventually learned to spot cable bacteria with the naked eye. Their wires look like spider silk reflecting the sun. Beautiful, and you can look at pictures of this. Actually I agree, they do look kind of like spider silk. They're kind of, uh, these glistening, almost invisible filaments that can kind of catch the light

in certain ways. Very beautiful. But one cool thing that I guess we have to consider is they're discovering that these electroactive bacteria are found all over the place. They're

abundant in ecosystems throughout the world. And given how abundant these electroactive bacteria are, it's not inconceivable that they play a major role in regulating various forms of geochemistry, like maybe regulating what kinds of minerals you would find in the top soil producing magnetite, maybe regulating the chemistry of

the atmosphere, or regulating the chemistry of the oceans. Right, So, I mean other tay come here is that this is not just some rare, obscure thing that you encountering only like you know, some sort of bizarre extreme environment. But they're they're they're found all over and could have a very important role. Now, primarily the examples we've been looking at so far have been bacteria that sort of pump

out electricity in order to metaphorically breathe. You know, the electricity is this waste product, so the extra electrons have to be disposed of and to something that will accept them. But we already mentioned that it does go both ways.

Like also mentioned in Fox Skellies article for the BBC is the idea that um that scientists have been finding more bacteria that simply are able to consume pure electricity that can assume electrons when they need to, and she gives the example of a University of Cincinnati microbiologists named in net Row who's found several bacterial species that live on the ocean floor and apparently they can live off

of pure electrical current if they need to. It's not that they naturally make make their lives this way, but it seems like this is something that they are able to to sustain themselves without dying for a period of time. So if I understand correctly, this is different than an organism that just like thrives on pure electricity with no food.

But there there is even evidence of, like you know, we were talking earlier about these relationships between electroactive organisms and one bacterium having electricity as a waste product and then routing it to a bacterium that will accept it as a as an incoming energy product. And there's even evidence of like cross species or cross organism type electrical grids spanning different kingdoms of life, and this example being the electrical cooperation between bacteria and archaea in deep ocean

floor habitats that are rich with methane. Uh to to quote from Fox Skellies article. The archaea feed on electrons from methane, oxidizing the gas to generate carbonate. They then pass the electrons onto their partner bacteria along the nano wires, which act like power cables. Finally, the bacteria deposit the electrons onto sulfate, producing energy that the cell can use

in the process. And so we don't know how far back these types of relationships go, but it's easy to imagine these these types of cooperation evolving billions of years ago, especially before Earth's atmosphere underwent the Great Poisoning when all the oxygen showed up. All right, we're gonna take a

quick break. When we come back, we're going to get to an area that a lot of you are probably thinking about, Like, you know, if we have we're talking about the organisms that they utilize electricity, they are producing these these nano filaments. Uh, then there's got to be a way that we could harness that power ourselves put them to work. Yeah, that's exactly what we're going to

discuss when we come back. Than alright, we're back. So if you're listening to this this podcast via some sort of an electronic device, I mean, we electronics are are kind of our thing right as a species. And so it stands to reason that as we discover these these these bacteria that are they're using electricity, that are that are creating these little filaments that we eat envisioned ways to again harness their power. I don't know about you.

I listen to my podcast by plugging directly into bacterial maps, like I've got a I've got a big stroma light in my house, and I just jack in, Well, that's not that's not as as as crazy distant from the reality the possible realities we're going to discuss, as one might think, it's it's a little crazy, but but yeah, when you when you think about the is actual electroactive bacteria that there do seem to be some potentials just one example, Like, there are all kinds of ideas where

people have talked about using electroactive bacteria as as potential electrical sources, but one of the many ideas I came across was to use the electrical potential of geobacter for small scale energy purposes. In Peru, so I was reading a few articles from about how researchers at the University of Engineering and Technology in Peru were pioneering a method to draw usable electricity directly from the soil, specifically using

the outflow of electrons from the respiration of geobactors. Now this is meaningful in in the context of what they were doing in Peru, because some villages and dwellings in the Peruvian rainforest don't have connections to the electrical grid. Mini don't at the time uh they were doing this project.

The project leaders claimed that it was like forty two of villages and in the rainforest did not have connections, and those that do have connections are at risk to lose power entirely when lines are knocked out by floods, has happened in March, and so this means of course, after it gets dark, people can't read, kids can't study for school unless they use like kerosene lamps, which are apparently unhealthy and are hard on the eyes. I can

imagine that. So this method, developed by ut EC in partnership with a company called FCB Mayo, works to charge batteries and power led lamps with a special bioelectric box.

And the box has a plant on top with roots planted in the soil and then electrodes plunged into this grid of little soil buckets that are full of geobactors, and the metabolic interaction between the plant and the geobactors generates excess electric charge in the soil, and that electric charge gets routed up through the electrodes that are planted in the soil, whisks those free electrons away to charge

of battery, which in turn powers the LED lamp. Now we're not sure how scalable this individual technology is, but it shows the general principle that you can draw small, at least small amounts of power or electricity directly from electric bacteria and the soil when other power sources are

not readily available. And this seems possibly like an interesting alternative to say, you know those small scale solar panels that you see being used to power individual devices or lights, you know, things like that, like various garden gnomes and whatnot that light up or their garden gnomes they get power. Yeah, I think so, you see, this is like the main place I feel like one tends to see this sort of technology, like little little lights that go in your

yard that have a little solar panel on them, you know. Uh, but oh, I guess I've just never seen one mounted in a gnome. But I see it now. It can have red light up eyes. Yeah, I mean, I assume there's a there has someone has had to have created one with the numb But you know, it's one thing

to to power an led ed lamp. But I think this does drive home that even if you're only talking about producing such small amounts of electricity to power uh, you know, you know, very low energy lighting effects, that still can make a huge difference in the right circumstances. Yeah, it can. And you can imagine using elements of this bacterial electro biology in concert with other technologies UH, to

build up more capabilities. Like in his Times article, Carl Zimmer mentions that a Cornell University researcher UH named Buzz Barstow and colleagues are trying to figure out if bacteria could be of use when paired with solar panels, so not in place of them, but working in concert with them, and the ideas that the solar panels would convert the sunlight into electric current, which would then be routed into bacterial wires down down to these colonies of bacterium called

shoe and Ella. That's the one I mentioned earlier that was discovered in Lake Oneida shoe and ella, and that could use the energy from the electrons to metabolize organic compounds and turn it into fuel. This would really be

key for for carbon fixation. So so the studying question here is two thousand nineteen study title Electrical Energy Storage with Engineered Biological Systems, published in the Journal of Biological Engineering, and we're essentially talking it kind of comes back to the virus movie we're talking about because we're essentially talking about a cybernetic energy storage system a synthesis of biological

and non biological electrochemical engineering. The authors point out that non biological methods for using electricity for carbon fixation they started to match and even exceed the capability of microbes, but that biological methods are better at pumping out the complex sort of complex molecules that are ultimately necessary for

biofuels and polymers. So it's it's kind of a way to improve, you know, the photosynthesis in this situation, like you think of it as like photosynthesis plus or photosynthesis two point oh. So it's like making in our official tree, except it's a solar panel and a bunch of bacteria. Yeah, well yeah, it's like it's it's part bacteria, part solar system technology and uh and and the results, yeah, can

could could help with carbon fixation. Yeah. Another thing Carl mentions is that the electrical bacterial filaments could be used as some form of sensors, like a little little tiny electro sensitive or conductive wires can be useful to you know,

essentially for signaling purposes. He gives the example of, uh, you know, being attached to some kind of wearable technology that would touch the skin, and these little bacterial nano wires could detect chemical changes in the properties of our sweat, and that might be biologically useful information that could be transmitted to a device that might tell you, I don't know what, you know, there's something wrong with your sweat, dude,

you need to Yeah. Yeah, just basically, you know, this gets into the whole area of like to whatever extent we can develop dependable like real time biomonitoring, medical medical monitoring technology like this kind of a you know, a huge positive impact on human health. But yeah, so Carl.

Carl mentioned specifically the work of Derek Lovely again. Uh so, you know, again the guy who discovered geobacter and and has since expanded in into discovering several other microbe species, just as other researchers have also discovered other MicroB species that have these capabilities. And he's pointed out that while geobacters filaments are super thin, like three nanometers in diameter,

some are more. Really, some of the more recently discovered bacteria have fatter filaments, and Uh and this is especially useful for us if we're looking to manipulate them. If you want to manipulate them into some sort of an electronic device like a nano wire sensors that we're talking about, it pays to have something a little on a you know, a slightly larger scale so that we can we can actually work with it. Lovely and Uh and his co authors.

They also point out that protein nano wire like this would have a number of advantage over silicon nano wires. So if we're talking about the biocompatibility, the state of the stability, the potential for modification into various biomolecules and quote chemicals of medical or environmental interest, and plus the sustainable method of producing these nano wires will make it easier to build the sort of devices we're trying to

make and hoping to make in the future. Uh. He points out that we've been making the thimble sized amounts of the sort of you know, wire materials that we need for for the future we're trying to build. But what we need we need buckets of them. We need buckets of these nano wires. And this is a possible means by which we can grow buckets of nano wires. Oh, it almost sounds like the early penicillin problem, you know, with the Oxford researchers in the lab and they were

working with Alexander Fleming strain of penicillin. We talked about this in a recent episode of Invention. Uh. You know, they could they could create this penicillin from the Penicillium fungus, the mold, but they couldn't make enough of it that it would be useful. Like the first time they tried to treat somebody with it who had a deadly infection. The guy was successfully treated for a few days, but the guy with the infection eventually died because they ran

out of penicillin. They just couldn't make enough of it. And they later Uh, it only broke through as a medicine because they discovered a more productive strain that could make more of the stuff. Yeah, And I want to come back to the the the the the sustainability aspect of this too. The idea here being that if you know, you could have these these devices and when they're done, you're not just like it's not going into a dump, it's not potentially being you know, part of some sort

of toxic waste. It is just biodegrading into the environment. Oh yeah, I mean, electronic waste is actually a big deal. Like we you know, we we don't see a lot of it. But what happens to all these electronic components when we're done with them and the thing breaks and you just throw it away. The possibility being able to grow these things, I mean obviously that's that that would have tremendous advantage. Yeah. Absolutely, And and that they'd be biodegradable.

You just you know, some other bacterium just eats them up when you're done. But another thing that I've read about these electroactive bacteria is that some of them are extremely good candidates for the bioremediation of waste, including toxic and radioactive waste, where they can take something like you know a type of radioactive waste s like, you know, a type of uranium, and they can, through their their metabolic process, reduce that uranium to say, a less soluble form.

So they're not going to completely destroy it, but they might change it into a form that makes it less damaging to the environment. And the same could be true for other forms of pollution. Another another thing I've seen it referenced is the the idea of using bacteria like this to clean up oil spills. You know that they can like eat eat hydrocarbons that are in places they

shouldn't be, right, plastic waste being another another big one. Yeah, So it's interesting We've been championing fungi on the show for a little bit here, and now it's it's bacteria's time to shine. We're back in the land of Jubilex. Yeah. Jubile X being the d n d uh demon lord of slimes and oozes, which in the bast episode we kind of associated loosely with bacteria, and it is the arch enemy of Zogdamoy, the demon lord of Funga. I raised the flag of Jubilex for today. Yes, that's my side,

all right, So there we have it. Um, there's you know, they're There are various areas here where we could branch off, so you know, if you're interested in hearing more episodes about about bacteria or about various means of dealing with radioactive waste, but we would love to hear from you in the meantime. Check out stuff to All Your Mind

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