14 DAY TRIAL // We've seen our share of odd inventions over the years, especially in the field of robots, but after Amazon revealed its air drone delivery service, we thought we were done with the uncanny for this week. Bristol Robotics Laboratory begs to differ though.
And it's begging to differ in a very radical fashion too, having invented a 3D printed, rubber-made robotic "heart" powered by urine.
It sounds like something perfect for April Fools' Day, but researchers from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK aren't kidding around at all.
In fact, their prototype robotic heart uses TangPlus rubber-like material and can perform 33 pumps, and charge up to 3.5 volts, using just two milliliters of "fresh" human urine.
If nothing else, the invention shows man's undeniable ability to make the best of everything, even human waste.
The researchers don't mean for this to be just a proof of concept though. They actually want to use the heart to power working robots.
They believe they could create many of them, all capable of monitoring pollution and air freshness.
"The energy harvested could be used by the EcoBot to perform sensing tasks such as monitoring air quality and pollution levels, and a number of such EcoBots could form a distributed mobile sensor network within a future city environment," the scientists wrote in their paper published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.
Improvements, at least to efficiency, are planned for the heart, but research on that front hasn't even begun yet.
The group has begun to look into other urine-powered electronics though. They feel that all the fluid accumulated in public urinals could be put to use in more than the ironic purpose of measuring air purity.
Depending on what filament extruders are invented for 3D printers in the future, this idea could be revisited.