<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>mpreda</author><text>I think researching in the opposite direction has more potential. Let me explain:&lt;p&gt;what we want isn&amp;#x27;t to generate electricity through bacteria that digests wastewater -- what we want is to feed electricity to the bacteria that digests wastewater, just to enable that bacteria to do it better, faster, and &amp;quot;wider&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s imagine I have a septic tank behind the house. I don&amp;#x27;t need to find out how I can run a LED light from the bacteria in the tank. What I want is to plug that biosystem to electrical power, so that the septic tank biorection is 100x speeded up, in a 10x smaller tank. Even if it uses up a few Watts of power.&lt;p&gt;And, once we do that, think of the possibilities that open up: once you feed power into the biosystem, it becomes energetically possible to drive bioreactions in the opposite direction from the energy gradient, basically driving the reaction &amp;quot;up the hill&amp;quot; with electrical power. Now that&amp;#x27;s something!</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Bacteria generate electricity from wastewater</title><url>https://actu.epfl.ch/news/bacteria-generate-electricity-from-wastewater/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>Rygian</author><text>From the &amp;quot;supplemental information&amp;quot; [1] part of the actual paper [2], the levels of current are measured in μA and tenths of volts (ie. in the order of μW of power).&lt;p&gt;What is fully unclear to me is how (or whether) that power can be harvested and put to any electrical use. Or perhaps it is only of chemical interest?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cell.com&amp;#x2F;cms&amp;#x2F;10.1016&amp;#x2F;j.joule.2023.08.006&amp;#x2F;attachment&amp;#x2F;517b3268-378a-494e-a5c6-020a6aebcb29&amp;#x2F;mmc1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cell.com&amp;#x2F;cms&amp;#x2F;10.1016&amp;#x2F;j.joule.2023.08.006&amp;#x2F;attachm...&lt;/a&gt;
[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cell.com&amp;#x2F;joule&amp;#x2F;fulltext&amp;#x2F;S2542-4351(23)00352-5?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2542435123003525%3Fshowall%3Dtrue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cell.com&amp;#x2F;joule&amp;#x2F;fulltext&amp;#x2F;S2542-4351(23)00352-5?_r...&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Bacteria generate electricity from wastewater</title><url>https://actu.epfl.ch/news/bacteria-generate-electricity-from-wastewater/</url></story>