Ask any comic book fan today and they will tell you that Miles Morales made an indelible mark on Marvel’s vast multimedia universe when he took up the mantle as our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Miles was thrust to the forefront of pop-culture when he became the breakout star of 2018’s Academy Award-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and he is now the titular protagonist in the PlayStation 5 launch title Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

As a biracial character of Puerto Rican and African American descent, he speaks to a completely different experience than the ubiquitous white superheroes we are more used to. It’s no surprise that his debut proved there was a huge audience of fans excited to see a hero that they could identify with. There’s no shortage of reasons for the character’s explosive popularity, but being a more progressive role model isn’t the only one. He also has some unique powers that Peter Parker didn’t. Though he is mostly a faithful successor to the original Spider-Man, possessing similar abilities, don’t go thinking he’s a carbon copy of the original. Miles has some unique tricks up his sleeve! Foremost is his signature ability to naturally generate electricity within his body and project it at will. Miles calls it ‘venom power’ because, you know, it stings! It’s an effective and creative addition to Spidey’s arsenal, but you don’t need comic book magic to explain it—this ability is far more real than you might think, thanks to the power of science!

Our Current Understanding

Venom power is a catchy name, but it has a real-world equivalent that’s even better: Bioelectrogenesis, the generation of electricity by living organisms. This superpower exists, and by understanding it maybe we can understand how Spider-Man’s version works. You may have learned before about how electricity is at play in most living creatures. A lot of our bodily functions—like conveying sensory information, activating muscles for movement, and even thinking—use electricity. Not in the sense of a current through wires in a machine, but electrochemistry in living cells. So now you might be asking, “What the hell is electrochemistry? Is it different from the kind of electricity that powers my phone?” And you know what? That’s a very good question. But to answer it, we need to learn a bit about electricity.

Electricity is, put simply, just the flow of electrons. You’ve probably heard of electrons before; they are the smallest of the particles that make up atoms. Electrons naturally possess a negative electric charge, which means that they are surrounded by a kind of invisible force field called an electromagnetic field. These negative force fields don’t like to overlap, causing electrons to push away if they get too close. They do, however, like to overlap with positively charged fields that protons—one of the particles that help make up the center of atoms—have. This causes electrons and protons to pull towards each other. You can observe the same behavior by playing with a couple of magnets. The way magnets push and pull each other is governed by the same force that causes electrons to push against each other—the electromagnetic force (scientists can be really literal with their names).

Now, try to visualize the flow of electrons along a wire. You probably imagine them moving freely down the wire, like cars driving down a highway, but it actually works a bit differently. Any conductor (a thing that electricity can go through) is made up of atoms, each with electrons orbiting around its nucleus (center of atoms made up of protons and neutrons). If you put free electrons—ones that aren’t attached to an atom—into a conductor, they will join atoms, and its force field will shove an existing electron out of its spot. That electron will then move to the next atom in line and do the same thing. This flow of electrons from one atom to another is what we call electric current.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Wall Socket

Let’s swing back around to Spider-Man and how this applies to his venom power. The most common way the power manifests is as a venom strike, a punch that discharges a large amount of electricity directly into an opponent. We know that electricity is just the movement of electrons so we can conclude that when Miles hits with a venom strike he is blasting a bunch of electrons through his hands and into the body of the unfortunate villain. We’ll get to how he does this later, but for now, let’s focus on what this does to the shocked scoundrel.

Like I mentioned earlier, humans (and most other living creatures) are pretty responsive to electric currents because our bodies use them a lot. For example, tiny electric pulses across cell membranes are what trigger neurons, letting me breathe and write these words. So when you’re shocked, and a much stronger current passes through your body—maybe because a certain webhead just smacked you with his patented taze-fist—the tissues it passes through can overreact to the flood of electricity. A current of sufficient strength can drown out the body’s normal electric signals and involuntarily activate nerves and muscles. The amount of electric current flowing is measured in amperes (A), and a current of only 10 milliamperes (mA) is enough to paralyze human muscles in a sustained contraction. If a current of 20 mA passes through your legs, it can contract the muscles there fast as possible, causing you to leap away more forcefully than you could normally achieve; that’s why you may have heard of people being thrown across the room by an electric shock. The same current can make breathing difficult. At about 75 mA breathing can stop completely and 100 mA can stop a heart.

You may have realized by now that this means that Miles doesn’t have to punch an enemy to shock them. If the electricity is doing most of the work, then all he has to do is simply touch them to deliver a stunning strike. For example, check out how vicious a shock he delivers in this clip from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

This brings up one last thing I should mention. When you’re dealing with electricity, one thing to always remember is that it needs a path to follow or else it will either stay put or dissipate in all directions. When Miles venom strikes an enemy, he is creating an electrical circuit for the current to flow along. The circuit begins with him and then travels directly into his opponent via his fist. From there, it courses down their body (doing all kinds of damage along the way) before reaching their feet and flowing out into the ground. The current then travels through the ground back to Miles through his feet and thereby closes the loop so it can keep flowing. He’s basically a human electric fence!

One limitation of this ability is that the ground introduces a lot of extra resistance to the circuit, limiting the amount of current that is delivered. One way Miles could get around this would be to touch his target in more than one spot at a time. This would allow the electric current to skip the ground entirely, traveling directly from him to his target and back, and deliver a much more powerful shock. In fact, this exact situation happened in the comics! Miles was originally able to banish the symbiotic villain Venom during his first encounter with the creature using his venom strike (I know, the naming convention gets a little confusing here), but by their second fight, Venom had developed a tolerance. Miles had to be completely enveloped by the symbiote before his venom strike was powerful enough to drive the villain away.

So now we understand how electricity works and how Miles Morales uses it against his enemies, but where does it come from? It turns out the answer is something that is at the very core of how life works, Electrochemistry.

My Chemistry-Sense is Tingling

Electrochemistry is just a type of chemistry that involves reactions that produce or consume free electrons. In chemistry, a reaction is a process that leads to the transformation of one set of chemical substances to another; the chemicals that go into a reaction are called the reactants and the ones that come out are called the products. There are lots of different kinds of reactions, but we are focusing on reactions in which there is a transfer of one or more electrons from one atom to another. 

These are called redox reactions. ‘Redox’ is a portmanteau of ‘reduction’ and ‘oxidation’ and these are terrible names for what is actually happening, but we are stuck with them. Reduction is when a substance gains electrons. Yup. It does the opposite of what the word ‘reduce’ means. Cool cool cool! Oxidation is when a substance loses electrons. It sometimes involves oxygen… but sometimes it doesn’t. Great! I wish that I could find the people who came up with these inaccurate names and venom punch them in the teeth. Unfortunately, they are all dead now, so I can’t. Oh well. 

In the above reaction, silver gained electrons and so it was reduced. You can tell because its charge changed from +1 to 0. Zinc lost electrons, its charge went up to 2+, so it was oxidized. In each and every redox reaction at least two things are going on: there’s a part of the reaction where the electrons are being released and another where they are being sucked up. Electrochemists call these different parts half-reactions, for obvious reasons. In this case, one half-reaction is the zinc losing electrons and the other is the silver gaining electrons. If each of these half-reactions occurred in contact with the other one, they’d just spontaneously go until they reached equilibrium and release energy as a bunch of heat. That’s not super helpful for us.

But don’t worry, we’ve already figured out a way to fix this problem. Batteries! Yup, batteries use electrochemistry. Cool, right? They harness the energy of redox reactions by physically isolating the half-reactions using a barrier called a separator. This causes a buildup of excess electrons in the cathode, which connects to the positive terminal, while a kind of electron vacuum occurs in the anode, which connects to the negative terminal. This way, electrons can only cross from one half-reaction to the other when we use a conductor to connect the cathode and anode. When we do so, a metal pin connected to the anode called a collector gathers the electron current and leads to the negative terminal. From there the current enters the conductor where it can be used to power a device before ending at the positive terminal and cathode.

For a hands-on example, go find a 9-volt battery. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Ready? Great! Hold the battery up to your face and then lick the cathode and anode at the same time. If you heard the siren song of electricity and felt that familiar tingle then congratulations, you just used your tongue as an electrical conductor! Voluntary electric shock aside, a lot of the amazing things in our modern lives are based on this one simple premise: putting a device between the two halves of just such a reaction; the half that donates electrons, and the half that accepts them. By harnessing that energy, in the form of the electricity it generates, a lot of the coolest things you’ve done today, up to and including reading this article, have been made possible.

Anyways, I hate to tell you this, but your body is just a sack of batteries (now it makes sense why we spent so long talking about them). Overall, it’s electrically neutral, but certain areas are more positively or negatively charged than others. Just like in a regular battery, the attraction of these charges can create energy and so we need barriers to keep them separate until we are ready to use that potential. Each neuron in your body is like its own tiny battery, using its cell membrane as a separator between positively and negatively charged ions and just waiting for a signal to bring those charges together. The amount of energy that could be created by letting these charges come together is what we call voltage. Basically, if the voltage is high, each electron is a lot more motivated to move and can do a lot more work than if the voltage is low. It also means that the electric current will travel farther and through more resistant substances to complete a circuit. By carefully controlling when certain ions enter and leave the cell, neurons can generate a voltage across their membranes and then propagate it down their bodies to create a current. At the cell’s tip, it releases a neurotransmitter that tells the next neuron down the line to continue carrying the current, allowing the electric signal to travel down the body.

Does whatever an electric eel can

Now then, if we truly want to understand Miles Morales’ electric powers, we need to look to nature. Meet Electrophorus electricus (I wonder if it has anything to do with electricity), commonly known as the electric eel. Despite their name and serpentine appearance, electric eels aren’t eels. They are much more closely related to carp or catfish and even need air to breathe. They live in murky streams and ponds in South America, feeding primarily on fish with the occasional amphibian, bird, or even small mammal. Oh, and did I mention that young eels live in nests made of their dad’s saliva? Weird.

These predators get their name from their long, cylindrical bodies and the enormous electric shock they can generate to jolt both predators and prey. It’s a real-life version of venom power! They can do this because of their unique nervous system. While the electric eel uses small amounts of electricity for cell-to-cell communication just like us, it has evolved to use the same mechanism as a power source. It has highly specialized disc-shaped cells called electrocytes that do something very cool. When the eel feels like it’s time to let loose the thunder, the electrocytes polarize, creating a positive and negative side, just like the terminals on the battery we looked at earlier. Each cell produces a voltage of only 0.15 volts (V) or 150 millivolts (mV), but the cells are packed together and oriented positive-to-negative into stacks thousands of cells long, like batteries piled into a flashlight. The current generated by an activated cell “shocks” any inactive neighbor into action, setting off an avalanche of activation that runs its course in just two milliseconds or so. 

This so-called serial connection causes the voltage of each cell in that stack to add together. The eel doesn’t just have the one stack though, it has a bunch of them bundled up next to each other like the fibers in a rope which together form the aptly named electric organ. This type of connection is called a parallel connection because each stack has an electric current that is running parallel to the others, eventually joining at either end. It has the effect of adding up all of the current generated by each stack of cells together. The electric organ spans 80% of the eel’s 8 ft (2.4 m) 44 lb (20 kg) body. Overall, they can generate a shock of up to 860 V and up to 1 A of current.

One limiting factor for the danger of electric eels is that they live in water, which provides additional outlets for the current. There’s a popular saying that electricity always takes “the path of least resistance”, but the saying is not quite right. Electricity takes all available paths, but the paths with less resistance get more current. So when the eel delivers a shock, a chunk of the current is diffused into the water around it. Only a fraction travels through the target. It’s still enough to cause intense pain and involuntary muscle contractions, but not enough to kill someone outright. The scarier thing by far is their tendency to leap out of the water to deliver their bioelectric payload. By delivering their shock out of the water and directly attached to their victim, they drastically decrease the resistance in the circuit and thus increase how much current is being delivered. This means it is a lot more painful and a lot more dangerous.

Let me suggest that Miles’ venom power works similarly to an electric eel, just much more powerful. Not only does this make scientific sense, but it also helps fill in a lot of the gaps that we don’t know about his powers. For example, we don’t currently know how Miles can generate such a large amount of bioelectricity. You could write it off as “superpower magic” or whatever, but that’s not very fun. Instead, what if we theorize that Miles has his own version of an electric organ, just like the electric eel, that stores his energy like a battery. Whenever he needs to, he can activate all the cells in that organ and create a super high voltage across his body. Electricity above 500 V is considered high voltage, and it’s enough to punch through the resistant barrier of the skin and zap someone with enough current to stop their heart. If a 44 lb eel can generate up to 860 V, Miles could theoretically generate significantly more considering he is nearly four times as massive. This might sound like baseless theorizing, but I have some evidence that could support the theory. Check out this clip from the Spider-Man: Miles Morales PlayStation game where Miles is absorbing the electricity from a large generator.

Do you see it yet? If not, try focusing on Miles’ body. It appears that the energy is being channeled through a series of vein-like structures from his arms to a nexus in his back. When Miles uses his venom power, his body glows to reveal a specialized organ spanning his entire body that can generate and conduct a powerful electric current. This could also account for the varying strength of his venom strike. Miles seems to have at least some level of choice over how powerful a shock he wants to deliver, which implies that he can control his electric organ the same way you or I can control a muscle. When you try to lift a weight with your arm, your bicep doesn’t immediately go from fully relaxed to fully flexed. It gradually flexes more until it is enough to lift the weight. Otherwise, we would just end up yeeting everything we picked up into the air. If Miles could selectively activate certain portions of his electric organ like they were different muscles, he could—with practice—precisely determine the voltage and current of his bioelectric discharge. Think back to what we learned about electricity earlier. Adjusting the voltage means controlling how far and through what materials the electricity can travel; adjusting the current means controlling how much energy the electricity has and how much damage it can do to the target.

This electric organ is like an array of internal batteries, so to speak. He drains it when he uses his venom power and it takes a brief time for it to recharge, just like any neuron, but it happens quickly. If it’s anything like an electric eel, he could deliver around 175 pulses of electricity each second. And he could keep it up until his body ran out of the energy needed to move the ions across his electrocyte membranes. He would need to eat and maybe sleep to restore himself, just like charging your phone at night. In fact, to some extent Miles is able to absorb electricity from power sources just like a rechargeable battery, as we saw in the above clip. And just like a rechargeable battery, bad things happen if you try to shove too much energy into him.

He explodes into a raging torrent of electricity! He calls this one a mega venom blast and it often happens when he absorbs more power than his body can hold. It’s a spectacular event, and it makes sense biologically. You see, I believe that Miles is having a seizure. Miles doesn’t have the capacity in his electric organ to store the power he’s absorbing, but it has to go somewhere. The excess electricity spills out into the rest of his body and begins to shock him. If there’s enough to reach his brain, it can overstimulate the neurons in the brain all at once, resulting in uncontrollable spasms and even loss of consciousness. The definition of a seizure is a sudden, uncontrollable electrical disturbance in the brain. For normal humans, electric shocks to the head are known to sometimes cause seizures in otherwise healthy people. These seizures can have a wide variety of effects, but uncontrollable movement and varying levels of consciousness are common. For Miles Morales, it has the additional effect of forcing him to suddenly discharge ALL of his stored bioelectricity at once in a massive blast, leaving him dazed and exhausted afterward.

The Ultimate Spider-Man

So, how does venom power work? Well, the most likely explanation is that the genetically modified spider that bit Miles Morales altered his DNA in a way that made him grow an electric organ that spans his entire body alongside his nervous system. This electric organ is capable of generating electricity just like a battery thanks to some handy chemistry. And it wouldn’t even require any comic-book pseudoscience; this ability already exists in nature! It’s an all-around awesome power with tons of fun possibilities to explore in future media. It’s also part of what makes Miles such a phenomenal addition to the Spider-Man canon and, personally, I can’t wait to see what his future has in store.