 Hello, my name is Saad. I'm going to talk to you about mud and Mediterranean. I do strange things. I make coffee machines out of clothes hangers. I make healthy boots. I make dinosaurs that are triggered from the internet. I make healthy boots that are activated by your butt. The world's first and only butt activated is healthy boots. It's the page from IKEA that fell out. But what I'm actually going to talk about is microbial fuel cells and if you get this slide, you're done. You can actually do this presentation. All right. Who's not familiar with Star Wars story line? You're not familiar. So we've got spoilers over here. I'm going to try and sidestep them, but it's in popular culture, so you shouldn't worry too much about it. Anybody have noticed the essential, quintessential difference between Star Trek and Star Wars? I have hacked as a reward. The boss is a good answer, but not the quintessential difference. Okay, maybe the hacks for some other crowd then. One is set in the past, one is set in the future. Anybody want to guess which one is which? Thank you very much. That's how it starts. That's the first thing that you get hacked. That's what it starts off with. This is Star Wars in a galaxy far far away a long time ago. So it's set in the past. So you cannot confuse two, which is this is why the fandom of one side and the fandom on the other side gets really, really annoyed when the time makes the two. But if you're running for a political office in India, it doesn't really matter. You can mix them up with Wolverine even. Anyway, so there was this one little boy in there called Anakin Skywalker and he grew up and went through quite a few phases as you can see from here. And this is basically what my presentation is based on because in the beginning there was this strange guy with long hair who came up and walked up to him and stole some of his blood and then analyzed his blood and found midichlorians in him and these midichlorians are tiny microbial creatures which apparently power the force. Okay, with me so far. Microscopic found in the blood that power the force. So the more midichlorians you have in your blood chances are the more control you have over the force. So Yoda, for example, has a lot of midichlorians. Anakin Skywalker turns out has a lot more and hence the prophesied one. No spoilers. In our world, however, much, much, much, much in the future, which is our present, which is what we're concerned about because the past is boring. It's in the past. The future is much more interesting. These are microbes, these are bacterium. Okay, this is a real thing. It's not a fictional thing. And this is important for us because in the age of Trump, very important to have, these things exist anywhere on the planet including acidic lakes, frozen, arctic polar regions and anywhere in the food in whatever we do. But what's important is that we rely on them. We have more bacterial cells in us than we have human cells. And this is a fact that blew my mind to the point that I was wondering, you know, why are we not talking about this one single thing for the rest of our lives? I mean, this is so amazing. The number of cells that make you you are fewer in comparison with the number of alien bacterial cells that you have inside your body right now. By a magnitude of 10, if you want to know more about it, you can look at it. But yes, once to 10. So every single human cell that I have that makes me me, there are 10 cells that are not human that are microbial. There's some dispute about this number. Some people say it's 1 is to 1.3, but the point I'm trying to make is it's good shit and it there's a lot more often alien DNA than there is human DNA. We see this in foods. We see this in other places. The two microbes that I want to tell you about and show you examples of is this one and this one. Geobacter and chubanella. And what's important about this is that they produce electricity. They're electro-genic. So if you're familiar with electric eels, they're biological creatures that produce electricity and will stun their prey into submission and then eat them. But they produce electricity without having batteries in them. And now our entire lives are revolving around things that are powered by batteries. I'm going to extend by one minute and then we'll do Q and A. So these bacterium, since they produce electricity, they're going to all they need to do is harness this power. So theoretically, if we have lots of these bacteria, which are everywhere, you can't really see them, you'll have an invisible thing or invisible film that will produce electricity. There's a video to show you how that works, but generally this is what a battery looks like. And if you put a bacterium instead of a chemical reaction, you're able to generate power. This is what it looks like in a lab. But if you want to do one of these by yourself, which is what I highly recommend, you can do this at home using mud that you get from a river. This is a good project. They've actually used this. This is a self-powered robot that roams around taking samples of things to see where the pollution is and powers itself using various renewable technologies, renewable sources of energy. So there's solar, there's wind and there's also microbes. So it pulls out microbes from the river and powers itself and keeps it living. Very useful in areas where power is not accessible. You can make your own batteries out of mud and that kind of looks like this. You get a jar, put in some charcoal at the bottom, fill it up with mud, put some charcoal on top. You've got two connectors, charcoal and charcoal, and you create a circuit and that's what you get out of it. That's about 0.1 volts of electricity per cell. I have the examples here later on, you can take a look. That's it. Questions? When did the cells expire? So it's a symbiotic relationship. Microbes, tiny little ones, they create a colony at the bottom because they're anaerobic, so they move away from oxygen and as long as they have food, they will survive. It's a symbiotic relationship. So it's fungus that breaks down complex sugars and bacterium, which is the electrogenic ones, which feed off of the simple sugars and produce electricity as a by-product of their metabolism. So the power that you're getting out of it is a by-product. So to answer your question, as long as there's food in the mud, it should last. The cell that I have here, I made in January, it's still going. It's got this much of mud in it. I should last for about, I don't know, five or six years. The tiny amount of voltage, tiny amount of power, but I mean, so it's impractical in every shape or form. So if you're starting thinking about, you know, can I use this to power my phone? No. So as long as there's food in there, like a decaying vegetable matter, it will stay alive. So if you want to recharge your battery, you just have to feed it. Just on that, you have a room for this. Yes. I could power my phone. Yes, you could. So if you had a room for these, yes. Actually, we probably wouldn't even need a room for, because theoretically, I can get about half a volt out of each one of these cells. And if you factor the surface area and carefully construct it, instead of just going to your kitchen and finding what you can find and making one of these, then you could probably make it smaller. So I have another example here. That would be your question. So I've been trying this out. It hasn't worked. But these are cells. So it's a tiny little sushi tray, and I've created a layer of exactly the same thing you're seeing in here. And I put them sort of like an array. So it doesn't produce enough voltage, but I'm hoping that when it grows enough to form a layer, it should be able to function as a battery. So yeah, if you do this, you could probably create as much as this table and you'd be able to power your phone. For how long? I don't know. About 60 years. Theoretically, yes. But then the amount of power that it puts out is a factor of the surface area that's in contact with the microbes. And they form like a biofilm. So it's very hard to predict. None that I can detect. It's very cool, literally. How's the erasure of the fish? Not. It's not at all. But from, you can try, I've got a volt multimeter here. You can plug it in and see. This one is relatively stable at 0.3 volts. And it sort of stays that way. But when you start drawing from it, it fluctuates wildly. Mostly because of the way it's been constructed. It's constructed in a way that you could try this at home. So if it was nicely done with maybe like sheets of graphite, it would probably be easier. I haven't been able to figure that out yet. Because the amount of charcoal that I put on top is limited by the container itself and the biofilm that forms underneath. So it's between the mud and the charcoal underneath. And the charcoal itself is sort of crushed. It's activated carbon. So, I mean, you get it from these humidifiers. That's where I got this stuff from. So you can't really tell how the biofilm is in contact with the charcoal and how much of these little tendrils are touching the charcoal. So the more surface area there is for these microbes to, you know, conduct electricity, the more power you'll be able to draw from it. But I haven't found a way to measure it yet. I think you're at time. But if you have any finished questions, can you come up for this?