Electric Skin

We are Nada, Catherine, Sequoia and Paige, a decentralised team of women based Mexico, Qatar, France and the USA. In our joining, we stumbled across a Science article titled “The Mud is Electric”. It told the story of the scientists who first documented electrically active bacteria and started playing with their possibilities. It turns out these bacteria are found everywhere in oxygen-starved soils, from salt marshes to backyard ponds and deep sea trenches. And their capabilities can be harnessed to generate power. For us, this was very intriguing. Is there a way to generate electricity by growing bacteria? What if we could create a material that could power our devices and go back to the soil at the end of its use? That’s the idea behind Electric Skin. A Self-Powering Material. Beautiful, growable, compostable. Straddling speculative energy futures and current innovation, we are developing a biomaterial device that can generate electricity using protein nanowires from Geobacter sulfurreducens. These proteins can create an electrical charge using moisture in the air. By building on the research at UMASS, we have so far been able to generate 0.7 Volts, on a tiny surface, the size of your fingertip. Electric Skin is deeply inspired by working with the evolutionary ingenuity of this tiny bacterium. Our vision is of a radically sustainable energy future, where our power generation and our electronics are growable and compostable. Where our devices have a new materiality, complex, textured, and perhaps even alive. Where our energy is grown - Not extracted.