Kenneth Stephen (Slashdot reader #1,950) writes: As the world rolls back on using coal to extract energy, it leaves behind empty coal mines. The BBC reports that the UK is actively using these coal mines as a source of geothermal energy.
The BBC visits a wine warehouse in the northeast England town Gateshead, where old coal mines "could still have a role to play in heating homes — but this time, without burning fossil fuels." A new district heating system in Gateshead is poised to begin warming homes and buildings in the area at a cost 5% below market rate, using the clean heat from its mines 150m (490ft) below the ground.
The water in the mines is naturally heated in the surrounding rocks to 20 degrees C (68 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the video report — so a heat exchanger on the surface just repurposes the extracted heat for energy consumers. It's a technique that's also being adopted in the Netherlands. But it's especially applicable in the U.K., where a quarter of homes are above old coal fields (as are 9 of its 10 major urban centers).

The report points out that coal is the world's largest source of CO2 emissions, but now coal production in the UK has fallen by 94% in the last 10 years. "So what happens when the coal mines that used to power our cities are no longer used?"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Insider: Walmart will be increasingly relying on automation at its stores in the coming years -- but that won't diminish the country's largest private employer's workforce, company leaders said during an investor event this week. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant recently made headlines when it announced that 65% of its stores will be "serviced by automation" by the end of fiscal year 2026. Walmart currently has more than 4,700 stores throughout the US and employs roughly 1.6 million people nationwide.

More specifically, one area where Walmart is seeking to increase investment is in market fulfillment centers (MFCs), which are automated fulfillment centers built within, or added to, a store. Walmart piloted this concept at a store in Salem, New Jersey, in 2019, using automated robot technology from Alert Innovation -- a robotics company Walmart acquired in October 2022. Since then, Walmart has built MFCs at several stores, such as in Jacksonville, Florida, and Dallas, Texas. Those include "manual MFCs," where associates pick items for online orders but in a separate area from the sales floor.

Walmart will still need at least the same level of workers to help in stores even as automation picks up, company leaders say. John Furner, Walmart US president and CEO, told investors this week that automation "helps" employees, as it will result in less manual labor. "Over time, we believe we'll have the same or more associates and a larger business overall," Furner said. "There will be new roles emerging that are less manual, better designed to serve customers, and pay more."

Walmart plans to have its own network of electric vehicle charging stations by 2030 to tap into the growing adoption of EVs in the United States. Reuters reports: The new fast-charging stations will be placed at thousands of Walmart and Sam's Club stores, alongside nearly 1,300 it already offers as part of a deal with Volkswagen unit Electrify America, one of the country's largest open public EV networks. Walmart's more than 5,000 stores and Sam's Club warehouses are located within 10 miles of about 90% of Americans.

"We have the ability to address range and charging anxiety in a way that no one else can in this country," Vishal Kapadia, Walmart's recently appointed senior vice president of Energy Transformation, said in an interview. Owning its chargers, instead of partnering with a network operator, will help Walmart address reliability and cost issues, Kapadia said. Kapadia said he expects the new charge points to be direct-current fast chargers, with about four chargers on average installed per store.

Startups and other companies trying to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom sparked by OpenAI are running into a problem: They can't find enough specialized computers to make their own AI software. The Information: A spike in demand for server chips that can train and run machine-learning software has caused a shortage, prompting major cloud-server providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle to limit their availability for customers, according to interviews with the cloud companies and their customers. Some customers have reported monthslong wait times to rent the hardware. "All the startups who are trying to get into this space...maybe they can get one [server] but there's no way they're going to get five," said Johnny Dallas, founder and CEO of Zeet, which sells software that makes it easier for engineers to run apps across multiple clouds.

The server chip shortage is a frustrating hangup for software developers trying to build AI tools hinging on recent advancements in machine-learning models. These programmers, at small and big companies alike, are developing large-language models to make personalized writing coaches or search engines that respond to questions with written answers rather than links, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Many others are licensing and augmenting software from OpenAI and its rivals to create specialized customer service chatbots and research tools for corporate employees. For instance, OpenAI software is helping Morgan Stanley bankers find the best locations to auction a work of art, based on the bank's myriad internal reports on art markets.

For $30, you can ship Best Buy a prepaid box filled with up to 15 pounds of unwanted electronics. CNET reports: Starting this month, two sizes of prepaid boxes are available on the Best Buy website: a 9-by-5-by-3-inch container that can carry up to 6 pounds for $23, and a larger, 18-by-14-by-4-inch box that can carry up to 15 pounds for $30. Once you've filled it up with approved electronics, you can take the box to a UPS location or arrange for a pickup.

The recycling-by-mail program is the latest salvo in Best Buy's campaign to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040. In April 2022, the company began offering a haul-away service that picks TVs, appliances and other products for recycling from customers' homes. You can also drop off unwanted electronics at Best Buy locations and trade in select merchandise for gift cards.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Like so much in our modern era, Australia's high-stakes gamble on renewable energy starts with an Elon Musk Twitter brag. South Australia's last coal-fired power plant had closed, leaving the province of 1.8 million heavily reliant on wind farms and power imports from a neighboring region. When an unprecedented blackout caused much of the country to question the state's dependence on clean power, Tesla boasted -- on Twitter, of course -- that it had a solution: It could build the world's biggest battery, and fast. "@Elonmusk, how serious are you about this," replied Australian software billionaire and climate activist Mike Cannon-Brookes. "Can you guarantee 100MW in 100 days?" Musk responded: "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?"

To the astonishment of many, Tesla succeeded, and today, almost seven years later, that battery and more like it have become central to a shockingly rapid energy transition. By the middle of the next decade, major coal-fired power stations that generate about half of Australia's electricity will shut down. Gas-fired plants are being retired, too, and nuclear power is banned. That leaves solar, wind and hydro as the major options in the country's post-coal future. "It's really a remarkable story," said Audrey Zibelman, the former head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, or AEMO, the agency that runs the grid, and now an adviser to Alphabet's X. "Because we're not interconnected, we've had to learn to do it in a much more sophisticated way, where a lot of other countries will go once they've shut down their fossils."

It may be Australia's biggest power buildout since electrification in the 1920s and 30s. And, if successful, could be replicated across the 80% of the world's population that lives in the so-called sun belt -- which includes Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India, southern China and Southeast Asia, says Professor Andrew Blakers, an expert in renewable energy and solar technology at Australian National University. That, in turn, would go a long way to halting climate change. Building battery storage is just one critical piece of the national project, and AEMO and others are worried coal plants will shut before there's enough additional electricity supply. Australia needs to increase its grid-scale wind and solar capacity ninefold by 2050. Connecting all that generation and storage into the grid will require more investment. Overall, the cost could be a staggering A$320 billion ($215 billion), and the money is starting to flow: Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., Macquarie Group Ltd., and billionaires Andrew Forrest and Cannon-Brookes have all been involved in headline-grabbing energy deals in recent months. New government support for renewables has also improved investor sentiment, according to the Clean Energy Investor Group, which includes project developers and financiers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: What's even harder-core than the IBM Model M? The Model F, the keyboard that launched alongside the IBM PC in 1981. After a 2017 relaunch, new models with the original layout are here. The project, which back in 2017 relaunched a modern keyboard inspired by a compact space-saver version of IBM's classic Model F, is launching its second generation of brand-new premium input devices, and this time, various layouts will be available. [...]

Enter the New Model F Keyboards project. "Ellipse" launched it in 2017 and attracted over $300,000 worth of orders, even at $399 each. Aside from the not-inconsiderable price, what put the author off was the layout. Space-saving and reduced-footprint keyboards are very popular among serious keyboard collectors, and the project chose two space-saver layouts from IBM's 4704 terminal, dubbed the Kishsaver after the collector who described it. The F77 layout has a numeric keypad, but no function keys; the even smaller F62 layout omits the keypad, or as the cool kids call it, it's a TKL layout, which we are informed stands for tenkeyless, presumably because it has 15 fewer keys.

Which is why the FOSS desk's bank account would tremble in fear if it were not an inanimate table in a database somewhere, because the Model F project has announced a new range, including full-size and compact 104-key layouts and most appealing to this large and heavy-handed vulture, a replica of the 122-key IBM Battleship, one of which we've been hunting for over a decade. The project occasionally has refurbished original IBM units. Now, though, a brand-new one is a $420 option. If that isn't exclusive enough, your correspondent also working on a model with beam springs, the mechanism from 1970s IBM business products. The first model of the brand new beam spring units is a mere $579.

Cisco Systems has left the Russian market, destroying tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment and components in the process. This is due to the fact that the developer of network equipment has no plans to resume operations in the country. Gagadget reports: Cisco Systems announced it would cease sales in the Russian market in March 2022. Three months later, the company refused to renew its licenses. In addition, at the same time, the American manufacturer announced its withdrawal from Russia and Belarus.

As it became known, Cisco Systems decided to physically destroy spare parts, product demonstrations, equipment and even furniture. The value of the destroyed stock is estimated at [$23.42 million]. The company has also disposed of fixed assets worth [$12,600]. By the end of 2022, Cisco Systems had reduced its workforce by a factor of 12 to five employees. The company terminated contracts with the rest in mid-2022, paying them a total of [$2.4 million]. The TASS Russian News Agency first reported the news.

Alphabet's Google released new details about the supercomputers it uses to train its artificial intelligence models, saying the systems are both faster and more power-efficient than comparable systems from Nvidia. From a report: Google has designed its own custom chip called the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU. It uses those chips for more than 90% of the company's work on artificial intelligence training, the process of feeding data through models to make them useful at tasks such as responding to queries with human-like text or generating images. The Google TPU is now in its fourth generation. Google on Tuesday published a scientific paper detailing how it has strung more than 4,000 of the chips together into a supercomputer using its own custom-developed optical switches to help connect individual machines.

Improving these connections has become a key point of competition among companies that build AI supercomputers because so-called large language models that power technologies like Google's Bard or OpenAI's ChatGPT have exploded in size, meaning they are far too large to store on a single chip. The models must instead be split across thousands of chips, which must then work together for weeks or more to train the model. Google's PaLM model - its largest publicly disclosed language model to date - was trained by splitting it across two of the 4,000-chip supercomputers over 50 days.

Rhode Island representative Jennifer Boylan has submitted legislation that would mandate the inclusion of solar power in all newly constructed single-family dwellings, multi-family dwellings, large commercial buildings, and parking lots exceeding 16,000 sq. ft. From a report: The legislation, titled the Solar Neighborhoods Act (PDF), calls for the Rhode Island Building Code Commission to establish new code requirements for each of the aforementioned construction types. The document specifies that, at a minimum, the Code Commission must add code provisions to address:

- Static load roof strength, requiring that roofs where solar equipment could be placed support a minimum of six pounds per square foot;
- Placement of non-solar-related rooftop equipment, considering positioning that avoids shading solar equipment and maximizes continuous roof space;
- Sizing and provision of extra electrical panels to accommodate the addition of an appropriately-sized future solar energy system; and
- Provision of space for a solar energy system DC-AC inverter in the utility room or on an outside wall.

The legislation also recommends that the Code Commission consider amending the building code to account for roof orientation and angle, roofing materials that minimize or require no roof penetrations, conduit for wiring from roof to electrical panels, and the inclusion of level 2 electric vehicle charging infrastructure. [...] The legislation further requires outdoor parking lots larger than 16,000 sq. ft to install raised solar-panel canopies covering at least 50% of the parking lot's surface, and that 5% of the parking spaces must feature electric vehicle charging stations. Moreover, 20% of parking spaces should be equipped with the infrastructure, such as underground wiring, to accommodate additional EV charging stations in the future. The report notes that California has already implemented a new construction solar mandate, and a similar measure is under consideration in Massachusetts.

Google is backtracking on its decision to put a file creation cap on Google Drive. From a report: Around two months ago, the company decided to cap all Google Drive users to 5 million files, even if they were paying for extra storage. The company did this in the worst way possible, rolling out the limit as a complete surprise and with no prior communication. Some users logged in to find they were suddenly millions of files over the new limit and unable to upload new files until they deleted enough to get under the limit. Some of these users were businesses that had the sudden file cap bring down their systems, and because Google never communicated that the change was coming, many people initially thought the limitation was a bug.

Apparently, sunshine really is the best disinfectant. The story made the tech news rounds on Friday, and Ars got Google on the record saying that the file cap was not a bug and was actually "a safeguard to prevent misuse of our system in a way that might impact the stability and safety of the system." After the weekend reaction to "Google Drive's Secret File Cap!" Google announced on Twitter Monday night that it was rolling back the limit. [...] Google told us it initially rolled the limitation out to stop what it called "misuse" of Drive, and with the tweet saying Google wants to "explore alternate approaches to ensure a great experience for all," it sounds like we might see more kinds of Drive limitations in the future.

Apple will expand ProMotion to the standard iPhone models in two years, according to Ross Young, CEO of Display Supply Chain Consultants. ProMotion was first introduced on the iPhone 13 Pro models in 2021 and remains exclusive to Pro models for now. MacRumors reports: In a tweet today, Young provided a roadmap outlining various display-related technologies coming to future iPhones. Notably, the roadmap indicates that low-power LTPO display technology will be expanded to the standard iPhones in 2025, which Young said will enable ProMotion on these devices, allowing the display to ramp up to a 120Hz refresh rate for smoother scrolling and video content when necessary.

ProMotion would also allow the display to ramp down to a more power-efficient refresh rate. iPhone 13 Pro models can ramp down to 10Hz, while iPhone 14 Pro models can go as low as 1Hz, allowing for an always-on display that can show the Lock Screen's clock, widgets, notifications, and wallpaper even when the device is locked. All in all, the roadmap suggests that the so-called "iPhone 17" and "iPhone 17 Plus" will feature ProMotion, and likely an always-on display too. Young also claimed the "iPhone 17 Pro" will be the first iPhone to feature under-panel Face ID technology.

Tim Cook's vision for AR and VR hasn't changed. "For almost a decade, Apple's CEO has been banging the drum that AR is more important than VR and that AR is fundamentally about bringing people together," reports The Verge. "And he's still at it." From the report: "If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the AR/VR piece, the idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people's communication, people's connection," Cook told GQ's Zach Baron in a long and very interesting profile just published by the magazine. Cook told Baron that he's interested in collaboration; he said something about measuring glass walls; he said his thinking on glasses-as-gadget has changed over the years.

None of this is a product announcement, of course, only the latest in a long string of hints about what Apple sees in this space. Cook's been on this particular line since at least 2016, when he said on Good Morning America that AR "gives the capability for both of us to sit and be very present, talking to each other, but also have other things -- visually -- for both of us to see." [...] At various times over the years, Cook has said AR is a powerful technology for education, that he thinks it'll be as common as "eating three meals a day," and that he thinks AR is as big an idea as the smartphone. But he keeps coming back to the idea that AR should be meant to bring people together in the real world, not keep them apart or transport them to another universe entirely.

Cook also offered what sounds like an explanation for why the headset, which has been heavily rumored over the last couple of years, has taken so long to come out. "I'm not interested in putting together pieces of somebody else's stuff," he told GQ. "Because we want to control the primary technology. Because we know that's how you innovate." Maybe the most revealing thing in the story is the way Cook explains Apple -- or at least explains the way he hopes you'll see Apple. He talks frequently about Apple's environmental commitments, its loud fight against "the data-industrial complex," and the way Apple is trying to help people have better relationships with technology. (Conveniently ignoring that Apple is perhaps more responsible for our phone addictions than any other company, of course.) "Because my philosophy is, if you're looking at the phone more than you're looking in somebody's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing." Apple plans to unveil a mixed-reality headset on June 5th at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

Google is bringing Android's "Nearby Share" feature to the desktop with a new Windows app. Google says the new program will make sharing between Windows and Android easier, letting you send files over in just a few clicks and taps. From a report: Google's Nearby Share has been built into Android for a few years now and allows you to locally transfer files over Wi-Fi, with the initial device-pairing happening over Bluetooth. Nearby share has been kind of tough to use in real life, since most people share files over the Internet. And for personal use, most people only have one Android device, their phone, so there has been nothing to share files with. A ton of Android users have Windows PCs, though, so for many this will be the first time Nearby Share has an actual use. Using the app is easy. Just download it from the Android website and click a few "next" buttons in the installer. You need a 64-bit Windows PC (not ARM, ironically) with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. From there you can easily share by dragging and dropping on Windows or by using the Android "share" button and hitting "Nearby Share." You have the option of signing in to the Windows app or not. If you don't you'll need to manually approve every transaction on both the phone and PC. If you sign in, you can set up auto-accept from yourself, anyone in your contacts, or the probably not advisable "everyone" option.

Data storage giant Western Digital has confirmed that hackers exfiltrated data from its systems during a "network security incident" last week. From a report: The California-based company said in a statement on Monday that an unauthorized third party gained access to "a number" of its internal systems on March 26. Western Digital hasn't confirmed the nature of the incident or revealed how it was compromised, but its statement suggests the incident may be linked to ransomware. [...] Western Digital notes that the incident "has caused and may continue to cause disruption" to the company's business operations.

PINE64 has an update about their Star64 single-board computer with a quad-core RISC-V processor: it will be available on April 4th in two configurations: 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99: Let me just quickly reiterate the Star64 features:


- Quad core 64bit RISC-V
- HDMI video output
- 4x DSI and 4x CSI lates
- i2c touch panel connector
- dual Gigabit Ethernet ports
- dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth
- 1x native USB3.0 port, 3x shared USB2.0 ports
- PCIe x1 open-ended slot and GPIO bus pins (i2c, SPI and UART).
- The board also features 128M QSPI flash and eMMC and microSD card slots.


The board will be available in two different RAM configurations — with 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99 respectively. The Star64 store page ought to already be live when you read this, but will be listed as out of stock until the 4th.
Liliputing offers this summary: The Star64 is a single-board computer with a quad-core RISC-V processor, support for up to 8GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage (as well as a microSD card reader). Developed by the folks at Pine64, it's designed to be an affordable platform for developers and hobbyists looking to get started with RISC-V architecture. Pine64 first announced it was working on the Star64 last summer...
Meanwhile, PINE64's Linux tablets, the PineTab2 and PineTab-V, will launch one week later on Tuesday, April 11th.

Other highlights from this month's community update: there's now a dedicated Debian with GNOME image with tailored settings for grayscale for their Linux-based "PineNote" e-ink tablets. ("Other OSes and desktop environments are being worked on too.")

And the update also includes photos of one user's cool 3D-printed replacement cases for their PinePhone featuring Tux the penguin.

In the US, heat pump purchases exceeded those of gas furnaces in 2022 -- part of a bigger trend that saw global heat pump sales grow by 11%. Electrek reports: According to analysis released today by the International Energy Agency (IEA), heat pump sales in Europe saw a record year, with sales growing by nearly 40%. And specifically, sales of air-to-water models in Europe that are compatible with typical radiators and underfloor heating systems jumped by almost 50%. In China, the world's largest heat pump market, sales remained stable amid a general slowdown of the economy.

Currently, heat pumps function as a main heating device in around 10% of buildings globally. That's the equivalent of over 100 million households, or 1 in 10 homes. But in order to meet climate goals, heat pumps will have to meet nearly 20% of global heating needs in buildings by 2030. If installations continue at the rate of the last two years, then the world may almost be on track to reach the 2030 goal. The IEA says that global heat pump sales will need to expand by well over 15% per year this decade if the world is to achieve net zero by 2050, and that multistory apartment buildings and commercial spaces in particular should be prioritized.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Like electronics or photonics, magnonics is an engineering subfield that aims to advance information technologies when it comes to speed, device architecture, and energy consumption. A magnon corresponds to the specific amount of energy required to change the magnetization of a material via a collective excitation called a spin wave. Because they interact with magnetic fields, magnons can be used to encode and transport data without electron flows, which involve energy loss through heating (known as Joule heating) of the conductor used. As Dirk Grundler, head of the Lab of Nanoscale Magnetic Materials and Magnonics (LMGN) in the School of Engineering explains, energy losses are an increasingly serious barrier to electronics as data speeds and storage demands soar. "With the advent of AI, the use of computing technology has increased so much that energy consumption threatens its development," Grundler says. "A major issue is traditional computing architecture, which separates processors and memory. The signal conversions involved in moving data between different components slow down computation and waste energy."

This inefficiency, known as the memory wall or Von Neumann bottleneck, has had researchers searching for new computing architectures that can better support the demands of big data. And now, Grundler believes his lab might have stumbled on such a "holy grail". While doing other experiments on a commercial wafer of the ferrimagnetic insulator yttrium iron garnet (YIG) with nanomagnetic strips on its surface, LMGN Ph.D. student Korbinian Baumgaertl was inspired to develop precisely engineered YIG-nanomagnet devices. With the Center of MicroNanoTechnology's support, Baumgaertl was able to excite spin waves in the YIG at specific gigahertz frequencies using radiofrequency signals, and -- crucially -- to reverse the magnetization of the surface nanomagnets. "The two possible orientations of these nanomagnets represent magnetic states 0 and 1, which allows digital information to be encoded and stored," Grundler explains.

The scientists made their discovery using a conventional vector network analyzer, which sent a spin wave through the YIG-nanomagnet device. Nanomagnet reversal happened only when the spin wave hit a certain amplitude, and could then be used to write and read data. "We can now show that the same waves we use for data processing can be used to switch the magnetic nanostructures so that we also have nonvolatile magnetic storage within the very same system," Grundler explains, adding that "nonvolatile" refers to the stable storage of data over long time periods without additional energy consumption. It's this ability to process and store data in the same place that gives the technique its potential to change the current computing architecture paradigm by putting an end to the energy-inefficient separation of processors and memory storage, and achieving what is known as in-memory computation. The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Like in other parts of the world, Canada is working out what the right to repair means for its people. The federal government said in its 2023 budget released Tuesday that it will bring the right to repair to Canada. At the same time, it's considering a universal charging port mandate like the European Union (EU) is implementing with USB-C. The Canadian federal government's 2023 budget introduces the right to repair under the chapter "Making Life More Affordable and Supporting the Middle Class." It says that the "government will work to implement a right to repair, with the aim of introducing a targeted framework for home appliances and electronics in 2024." The government plans to hold consultations on the matter and claimed it will "work closely with provinces and territories" to implement the right to repair in Canada:

"When it comes to broken appliances or devices, high repair fees and a lack of access to specific parts often mean Canadians are pushed to buy new products rather than repairing the ones they have. This is expensive for people and creates harmful waste. Devices and appliances should be easy to repair, spare parts should be readily accessible, and companies should not be able to prevent repairs with complex programming or hard-to-obtain bespoke parts. By cutting down on the number of devices and appliances that are thrown out, we will be able to make life more affordable for Canadians and protect our environment."

The budget also insinuates that right-to-repair legislation can make third-party repairs cheaper than getting a phone, for example, repaired by the manufacturer, where it could cost "far more than it should." Canada's 2023 budget also revealed the government's interest in introducing a standard charging port for electronics. The budget says the government "will work with international partners and other stakeholders to explore implementing a standard charging port in Canada." It says a universal charging port could help residents save money and e-waste. "Every time Canadians purchase new devices, they need to buy new chargers to go along with them, which drives up costs and increases electronic waste," the budget says.

Researchers have developed a novel fuel cell implant for type 1 diabetes that can successfully produce and release insulin when triggered. New Atlas reports: The fuel cell itself, which resembles a teabag that's slightly larger than a fingernail, is covered in a nonwoven fabric and coated with alginate, an algae-derived product used widely in biomedicine because of its high degree of biocompatibility. When implanted under the skin, the cell's alginate soaks up body fluid, allowing glucose to permeate the surface and flow into the power center. Inside the cell, the team developed a copper-based nanoparticle anode that splits glucose into gluconic acid and a proton to generate an electric current. "Many people, especially in the Western industrialized nations, consume more carbohydrates than they need in everyday life," [Martin Fussenegger from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich] said. "This gave us the idea of using this excess metabolic energy to produce electricity to power biomedical devices.

The fuel cell was then coupled with an insulin capsule featuring the team's beta cells, which could be triggered to secrete insulin via electric current from the implant. Overall, the two components provide a self-regulating circuit. When the fuel cell powered by glucose senses excess blood sugar, it powers up. This then stimulates the beta cells to produce and secrete insulin. As blood sugar levels dip, it trips a threshold sensor in the fuel cell, so it powers down, in turn stopping the insulin production and release. This self-sustained circuit could also produce enough power to communicate with a device such as a smartphone, which allows for monitoring and adjusting, and even has potential for remote access for medical intervention. The study was published in the journal Advanced Materials.