An eel that’s not an eel: Electric eel

I’ve heard of this creature before a few years back but I don’t think I bothered to find out more about it back then. All I knew was that its an electric fish (yes, a fish and not an eel; makes me wonder why its called that way though) which produces electricity.

Every single cell generates about 0.1V and several thousands of cells in series and parallel could generate about 500V of electricity. That’s an overwhelming amount of electric power from an organism. One could imagine number of potential applications if we could build cells which could replicate the electrical nature of these cells. Not to my surprise, I found this work done by researchers at Yale University where they tried to build something of this sort which I’m yet to read up thoroughly.

I googled for something which had the words electricity, proteins, cytoskeleton, cells (related to my research work) and one of the sites listed had this video and hence this post today.

Its interesting how people came up with such neat videos back in the 50s which didn’t see much of the digital advancements. Infact this seems so much better than some of the videos we get today. Turns out that Moody Institute of Science made several such educational/science videos of exceptional quality back in the 50’s and 60’s. Take a look at this and I’m sure you’d want to watch more of their videos.