The electricity that a person generates can be enough to charge a mobile phone. Our neurons are under constant voltage, and the difference between life and death can be determined by the electrical waves on the encephalogram.
Stingray treatment
Once in ancient Rome, the son of a wealthy architect and a novice doctor, Claudius Galen was walking along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. And then a very strange sight appeared to his eyes - two inhabitants of nearby villages were walking towards him, to whose heads were tied electric rays! This is how history describes the first known case of physiotherapy using live electricity. The method was taken into account by Galen, and in such an unusual way he saved from pain after wounds of gladiators, and even healed the aching back of the Emperor Mark Antony himself, who soon after that appointed him as his personal doctor.
After that, the person more than once faced the inexplicable phenomenon of "living electricity". And the experience was not always positive. So, once, in the era of great geographical discoveries, off the coast of the Amazon, Europeans encountered local electric eels, which generated an electric voltage in the water up to 550 volts. Woe was the one who accidentally fell into the three-meter zone of destruction.
Electricity in everyone
But for the first time, science drew attention to electrophysics, or rather to the ability of living organisms to generate electricity, after an amusing incident with frog legs in the 18th century, which one rainy day somewhere in Bologna, began to twitch from contact with iron. The wife of the Bolognese professor Luigi Galvatti, who went to the butcher's shop for a French delicacy, saw this terrible picture and told her husband about the evil spirits that were raging in the neighborhood. But Galvatti looked at it from a scientific point of view, and after 25 years of hard work, his book "Treatises on the Power of Electricity in Muscular Movement" was published. In it, the scientist said for the first time - there is electricity in each of us, and nerves are a kind of "electrical wires".
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How it works
How does a person generate electricity? This is due to the numerous biochemical processes that occur at the cellular level. There are many different chemicals present inside our body - oxygen, sodium, calcium, potassium and many others. Their reactions with each other generate electrical energy. For example, in the process of "cellular respiration", when the cell releases energy obtained from water, carbon dioxide, and so on. It, in turn, is deposited in special chemical high-energy compounds, we will conditionally call it "storage facilities", and subsequently used "as needed."
But this is just one example - there are many chemical processes in our body that generate electricity. Each person is a real power plant, and it is quite possible to use it in everyday life.
How many watts do we produce?
Human energy as an alternative source of nutrition has long ceased to be a fantasy dream. People have great prospects as generators of electricity, it can be generated from almost any of our actions. So, from one breath you can get 1 W, and a calm step is enough to power a 60 W light bulb, and it will be enough to charge the phone. So that the problem with resources and alternative energy sources, a person can solve, in the literal sense, himself.
There is little to do - to learn how to transfer the energy that we are so uselessly wasting, "where it is needed." And the researchers already have proposals on this score. Thus, the effect of piezoelectricity, which creates stress from mechanical action, is being actively studied. On its basis, back in 2011, Australian scientists proposed a model of a computer that would be charged by pressing keys. In Korea, they are developing a phone that will be charged from conversations, that is, from sound waves, and a group of scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology has created a working prototype of a "nanogenerator" made of zinc oxide, which is implanted into the human body and generates current from our every movement.
But that's not all, to help solar panels in some cities they are going to receive energy from rush hour, more precisely from vibrations when walking pedestrians and cars, and then use it to illuminate the city. This idea was proposed by London-based architects from Facility Architects. According to them: “During rush hours, 34,000 people pass through Victoria Station in 60 minutes. You don't need to be a mathematical genius to understand that if you can use this energy, you can actually get a very useful source of energy that is currently being wasted. By the way, the Japanese are already using turnstiles in the Tokyo subway for this, through which hundreds of thousands of people pass every day. Still, railways are the main transport arteries of the Land of the Rising Sun.
Waves of Death
By the way, living electricity is the cause of many very strange phenomena that science is still unable to explain. Perhaps the most famous of them is the "death wave", the discovery of which led to a new stage of debate about the existence of the soul and about the nature of the "near-death experience", which is sometimes told by people who have experienced clinical death.
In 2009, in one of the American hospitals, encephalograms were taken from nine dying people, who at that time could no longer be saved. The experiment was conducted to resolve a longstanding ethical controversy over when a person is truly dead. The results were sensational - after the death of all the subjects, the brain, which should have already been killed, literally exploded - incredibly powerful bursts of electrical impulses appeared in it, which had never been observed in a living person. They occurred two to three minutes after cardiac arrest and lasted about three minutes. Prior to that, similar experiments were carried out on rats, in which the same thing began a minute after death and lasted 10 seconds. Scientists fatalistically dubbed this phenomenon the "wave of death."
The scientific explanation for "death waves" has raised many ethical questions. According to one of the experimenters, Dr. Lakhmir Chawla, such bursts of brain activity are explained by the fact that from a lack of oxygen, neurons lose their electrical potential and discharge, emitting impulses "like an avalanche." "Living" neurons are constantly under a small negative voltage - 70 minnivolts, which is maintained by getting rid of positive ions that remain outside. After death, the balance is disturbed, and neurons quickly change polarity from "minus" to "plus". Hence the "wave of death".
If this theory is correct, the "death wave" on the encephalogram draws that elusive line between life and death. After it, the work of the neuron cannot be restored, the body will no longer be able to receive electrical impulses. In other words, there is no longer any point for doctors to fight for a person's life.
But what if you look at the problem from the other side. Assume that the "death wave" is the last attempt by the brain to give the heart an electrical charge in order to restore it to work. In this case, during the “wave of death”, you should not fold your hands, but, on the contrary, use this chance to save your life. So says resuscitation doctor, Lance-Becker from the University of Pennsylvania, pointing out that there were cases when a person "came to life" after a "wave", which means that a bright burst of electrical impulses in the human body, and then a decline, cannot yet be considered the last threshold.