Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from

Curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer. And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today you learn

about how bacteria in your gut can produce electricity.

Then performer and lecturer Tom Britton will tell us about the origins of seances

and how Hollywood gets them wrong.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

There is a whole class of bacteria that have superpowers.

They can generate their own electricity.

They're called eletrogenic bacteria and believe it or not,

they're probably inside your body right now.

Yeah that's it baby you're electric.

Electrogenic bacteria are bacteria that give off electrons

while bacteria that wield force lightning sounds like something that

should be rare it's surprisingly common. Most often these bacteria live in

hard to get places like the bottoms of lakes. But in 2018, scientists gave the world

a shock, pun intended, when they discovered electrogenic bacteria in the human gut. We now know that many of these bacteria are an important part of the

human microbiome. There's at least one you've probably heard of, Lactobacillus.

It's a species used to make yogurt and it's naturally found in the human gut and yes it's

Electrogenic

Electrogenic bacteria spit out electrons for the same reason we breathe oxygen when the mitochondria and our cells break down sugars

to produce energy, they pass electrons down a sort of molecular assembly line. That

line ends with oxygen, which takes in any leftover electrons.

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