Published in News

Boffins come up with batteries you can swallow

by on05 November 2014



Because it happens all the time

MIT has come up with a technique which allows terminally dim children, begat of stupid parents, to swallow batteries. Apparently year, nearly 4,000 children go to emergency rooms after swallowing button batteries which can cause burns that permanently damage the esophagus, tears in the digestive tract, and in some cases, even removing the kid from the gene pool.

Boffins at MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital have devised a new way to coat batteries with a special material that prevents them from conducting electricity after being swallowed. In animal tests, they found that such batteries did not damage the gastrointestinal (GI) tract at all, the only tricky thing was finding an animal (other than a dog) which was dumb enough to eat them.

David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), and Department of Chemical Engineering said that once the battery was swallowed When batteries are swallowed, they start interacting with water or saliva. This creates an electric current that produces hydroxide, a caustic ion that damages tissue.

Quantum tunnelling composite (QTC), an off-the-shelf material commonly used in computer keyboards and touch screens, fit the bill perfectly. QTC is a rubberlike material, usually made of silicone, embedded with metal particles. Under normal circumstances, these particles are too far apart to conduct an electric current. However, when squeezed, the particles come closer together and start conducting. This allows QTC to switch from an insulator to a conductor.

Very clever, still no cure for cancer but some more stupid children will live to buy Apple products, walk into lamp-posts while texting and watch reality TV.

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