Researchers Report Super-Powered Battery Breakthrough 244
another random user writes with news that researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are reporting a breakthrough in battery technology. They say:
"With currently available power sources, users have had to choose between power and energy. For applications that need a lot of power, like broadcasting a radio signal over a long distance, capacitors can release energy very quickly but can only store a small amount. For applications that need a lot of energy, like playing a radio for a long time, fuel cells and batteries can hold a lot of energy but release it or recharge slowly. ... The new microbatteries offer both power and energy, and by tweaking the structure a bit, the researchers can tune them over a wide range on the power-versus-energy scale (abstract). The batteries owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Batteries have two key components: the anode (minus side) and cathode (plus side). Building on a novel fast-charging cathode design by materials science and engineering professor Paul Braun’s group, King and Pikul developed a matching anode and then developed a new way to integrate the two components at the microscale to make a complete battery with superior performance. With so much power, the batteries could enable sensors or radio signals that broadcast 30 times farther, or devices 30 times smaller. The batteries are rechargeable and can charge 1,000 times faster than competing technologies – imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second. In addition to consumer electronics, medical devices, lasers, sensors and other applications could see leaps forward in technology with such power sources available."
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
...Magic was discovered today and practical and affordable applications for it are now only 30 years away!
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
The thing is that 'magic' (as in your example which is 'Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.') has been discovered with practical and affordable applications so many times in our lifetimes that it isn't an absurd to believe it will happen again.
Wait. This new battery was written in Perl?
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Inversely though children will be taught these things more and more at a young age in science class and a few nerds will remain to slowly push humanity forward tidbit by tidbit. These examples are already pretty much standard classroom fair for grade schoolers. At least they were in the 80's.
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Virtually all of that magic has been incremental steps, not exponential leaps. Whenever I read a new report of a scientific breakthrough that is suddenly orders of magnitude beyond the level of what we have now, I'm skeptical of it. When there is an actual working product that is actually on the market (and not just promises that it will be there within 5 years), then I'll get excited about it. Until then, this is just another vaporware.
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To put it another way, waiting for things to become available in Walmart before noticing them means at some point wondering WTF has happened to the world.
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I think you are misinterpreting what I said. The media has a habit of misreporting scientific studies and the scientific community has a habit of falsifying data to get published. Therefore, when I hear a claim of a sudden breakthrough that is unbelievable, I...don't believe it. Or at least maintain a healthy skepticism. While these batteries may very well be exactly what the story claims, the real proof in the pudding will be if this ever makes it off paper, which it surely will if it's as amazing as
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That mean you shouldn't be here, or reading any articles about science or engineering.. What you want to be looking at is a catalog, or Amazon.
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Well magic battery technology practical and affordable has been discovered several times in the last decade. We are still waiting for the practical application ... It is very cheap to claim breakthrough in science. The only interesting thing is that it is not using graphene.
And that's not a recent phenomenon. When I was a kid almost 3 decades ago, I loved to read science magazine. I don't think a quarter of the breakthrough made it to production.
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure i'll get hatred for saying this but...
Not hatred, but pity. Pity for you are a fool. The world has great need of decent portable power beyond phones.
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The world has great need of decent portable power beyond phones.
This is true. Unfortunately, TFA says that they have created "microbatteries." While an anecdotal example of jump starting a car with a microbattery is included, lacking any numbers such as kwh of energy we have no idea if these can be scaled "beyond phones."
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Yes it does (Score:5, Informative)
"Here we report lithium ion microbatteries having power densities up to 7.4mWcm2m1,which equals or exceeds that of the best supercapacitors, and which is 2,000 times higher than that of other microbatteries."
WTF more do you want? you can calculate almost everything from there.
Sheesh.
Re:Yes it does (Score:5, Informative)
For god's sake, if you're going to quote technical math, can't you at least get it transcribed right? 7.4mWcm2m1 is utter nonsense. I realize for reasons unknown slashdot does not implement even elementary HTML markup like Greek letters, superscript and subscript. Preview shows garbage from cut and paste, so just improvise.
The article says 7.4 mW cm^-2 micrometer^-1, which are pretty bizarre units, but readily convertinle to 74 GW/m^3, or 74 MW/liter. That gives us the power density in meaningful form, and it seems pretty damn impressive to me.
Re:Yes it does (Score:5, Interesting)
What concerns me is how this density is going to react to being shorted out.
Flames? Explosion? China Syndrome?
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Like "personal massage wands" for example
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You forgot to check the "Post Anonymously" checkbox. Observe.
That was the most worthless infomercial ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
That was the most worthless infomercial ever.
Re:That was the most worthless infomercial ever. (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. The whole article is full of vague comparison like 30 times farther, 30 times smaller, 1000 times faster etc. The abstract does not even talk about energy density. It only talks about power density. Even that is blatantly exaggerated. Based on the abstract, it translated to max 74 W/cm^3. The article claims, cell phone using batteries few millimeter in size can jump start a car. How is this possible unless the definition of "few" is overstretched and use a cell phone of the size of olden days public phone.
Maybe you should learn to read? (Score:2)
from the abstract:
"Here we report lithium ion microbatteries having power densities up to 7.4mWcm2m1..."
Re:Maybe you should learn to read? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm afraid your cut and paste came out complete garbage. The number you want to express is 7.4 mW cm^-2 micrometer^-1, which is more conventionally expressed as 74 MW/liter. Slashdot's markup support for compositions is incredibly crude.
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If my cell phone can transmit 30 times farther, I'm guessing that the power will drain from the battery 30 times faster.
Assuming that your cellphone transmit unidirectionally (as it's natural for a cellphone to do!), is not getting 30 times the 'r' requires 'r^2' more power, i.e., your battery will drain 900 times faster? ;-)
Paul B.
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Looks like no extra energy in batteries (Score:2)
OK, if this actually works out, this is great news. Fast charge and discharge are incredibly useful. Unfortunately, the article does not say anything about storing more energy than existing batteries, which I assume means energy storage is about the same. So, you will be able to recharge your phone very quickly (seconds?), but the phone will still last as long on the batteries as it does now.
Re:Looks like no extra energy in batteries (Score:5, Insightful)
Which if we stop sacrificing everything at the alter of thin is fine.
A GS3 or Iphone5 could be twice the thickness and easily just as portable and easy to use. This would more than double the battery life since the extra volume could essentially be just battery and not radio or mobo.
So you would have a smartphone that lasted 2-5 days and could be charged in minutes.
On the car side, 100 miles is plenty of range if I can charge in 10 minutes. That would give you a nice short break every 2 hours.
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I carry my phone in my pocket as well.
Unless you are wearing your girlfriend's jeans you should not have a problem. I have placed phones with extended battery packs into my pockets just fine.
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Not every one wears dockers.
Those of us with great asses wear jeans.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Looks like no extra energy in batteries (Score:5, Funny)
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As someone who carries his phone in his pocket instead of his purse I disagree.
Sigh. If only I could fit my cell phone [streettech.com] into my pocket.
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Sigh. If only I could fit my cell phone [streettech.com] into my pocket.
You just need the right size pockets [geekologie.com].
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A GS3 or Iphone5 could be twice the thickness and easily just as portable and easy to use. This would more than double the battery life since the extra volume could essentially be just battery and not radio or mobo.
Double the thickness would triple or quadruple the battery capacity.
But don't hold your breath. I expect this to happen around the same time fashion designers stop using walking bags of antlers to model their clothes.
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I was trying to be conservative with my estimates.
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If you had actually been paying attention, you would have notices cell phones are getting bigger.
Capacity... (Score:2)
It's why I opted for the lower performance but much better battery in my RAZR MAXX over the RAZR when they first came out.
Next though, it'll be performance. Holding out to see if it'll be the S4 or if another flagship phone will be worth buying Q3/4 ish...
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If they offered that with stock android or at least an unlocked boot loader I would have considered it.
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If they offered that with stock android or at least an unlocked boot loader I would have considered it.
If you're willing to buy it off-contract (and thus unsubsidised) such a thing exists [motorola.com], in the US at least.
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I expect this to happen around the same time fashion designers stop using walking bags of antlers to model their clothes.
Can we start a global campaign to have Christina Hendricks model all women's clothing to address this problem?
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I've considered several times trying to modify my phone to take a battery twice as large.
If used heavily, my phone usually dies halfway through the evening which means doubling
the capacity would be more than enough. I don't have a problem plugging my phone in every
evening so I really only need 12-16 hours instead of the 8-10 I currently get but ideally I would
want 40 hours (or a second battery) for the rare occasion I forget to plug it in. Either way, my
phone is plenty thin and I would barely notice the e
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You could try this:
http://boondeeworkshop.com/cellphone/index.html [boondeeworkshop.com]
Not exactly portable. It might make sense if you use your phone mostly in your car.
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Amusing. I actually just discovered that there are third parties that make double capacity
batteries and modified battery covers under the name "high-capacity" or more commonly
"extended". For my phone the prices seemed to be only $10-$20 for the new extended battery
and the free case. Not for sure why I never thought to search for this before.
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No, that would give you a nice short heart-attack every hour, as you rush to find the nearest freeway exist, and nearby charging station, before running completely out of power.
If we had Nascar-like service stations every 20 miles along every stretch of road, highway, freeway, and dirt path, everywhere... THEN 100 mile range would work just-fine. Otherwise, no. 200 is a pretty
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How fast are you driving? and do you only drive on freeways?
200 is 4 hours assuming not all freeway. Even freeway you would be at 3 hours. Which is a long time to be behind the wheel. If you live out in the west I can see that.
Here on the East coast 100 miles would be fine.
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I doubt it. Plenty of folks on the east coast commute, too. I'm sure plenty of them drive close to 100 miles each way... enough to give them severe range anxiety.
And that's just commuting... Start talking about weekend trips, and lots of people go way over that 100 mile trip range, and have to panic to find a station, and curse the extra time.
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100 miles would take you from NYC to Philly with 3 miles to spare. That is long way. 100 mile commutes, each way are pretty rare on the east coast.
Even a weekend trip, that is a decent distance, much longer and you might as well take a plane.
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100 miles would take you from NYC to Philly with 3 miles to spare. That is long way. 100 mile commutes, each way are pretty rare on the east coast.
Even a weekend trip, that is a decent distance, much longer and you might as well take a plane.
Wow, you are soooo out of touch.... that is not a long way... not even close...
I do a 70+ miles round trip commute every day in the North East (Boston area). Unless there is a charge station at work, a 100 mile range just won't cut it. Especially when you start to factor in sitting in traffic due to accidents, storms, reduced range due to below freezing weather, etc. I would feel more comfortable with a 200 mile range, but that is still cutting it close in the winter time (reduced power due to frigid w
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I live on the east coast and routinely drive 5 hours at a stretch. My parents are 5 hours and just under 300 miles away. I can do it in one tank of gas easy.
I have gone as long 6 hours before stopping to stretch. After that the car usually needs gas anyways.
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*You* must be a professional driver or be a traveling salesman or something. From http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-15.pdf [census.gov], 42.3% of people took fewer than 20 minutes to get to work. (You get to 56.5% for fewer than 25). Even if that 20 minut
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There was a time when 100 miles was the range of any car, yet they still drove them across the country. If it was popular all that would means in more charging station.
Or a portable windmill
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With phones and other small devices that store electricity in milliamp hours the capacity of the grid inputs is not an issue. With cars it is the gating concern.
If a car can go 5 miles on a charge of one kilowatt hour, it will take a charge of 20 KWh to travel 100 mi. If you use a 240v 30 Amp.line which can transmit 7.2 KWh in one hour, a 20 KWh charge will take more than 3 hrs. (hint the charging process will not be 100% efficient).
To transmit 20 KWh in 10 min requires 120 KW of power. By way of comparison
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Yes, energy transfer is most certainly a gating concern.
Tesla's supercharger cable transmits power at the rate of 90kw right now. The Model S can have an 85Kwh battery, so we are looking at recharge times of about an hour. If the batteries are not limiting in any way, one would need to connect 57 of these supercharging cables to the car to recharge in 60 seconds. Clearly, a new charging port would be needed. Let's see, if we want to move 85 KwH in one minute, our charge rate needs to be
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I actually agree with you about the thickness part.. but..
Do you mean with CURRENT battery technology, or what was described here? Even a current phone takes more than "minutes" (what people infer as "a few minutes") to charge all the way.
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I keep hoping for the battery that will finally allow the electric motor to kill the combustion engine. What little the article says sounds great, but it doesn't speak to a lot of questions, and too soon concludes with trite superlative and celebratory statements. "... breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources." Sure it does-- if such batteries aren't prohibitively expensive to manufacture, can be scaled up to power cars, don't have memory problems, will last for thousands of discharge cycles, aren
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I keep hoping for the battery that will finally allow the electric motor to kill the combustion engine.
Why? Combustion engines are fun. Anyhow, this battery seems to be about faster charge rate, and the battery pack is already not the bottleneck there for cars.
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Combustion engines, while fun, spew poison into the air.
So do electric power plants. What matters is how much, and modern combustion engines are very well optimized in that regard - something like 1/10000th of what a car from the 60s would.
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And yet still twice as much as a coal fired power plant, 100 times as mich as a gas fired powerplant, and a million times more than a wind turbine.
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I can see these being a step between supercaps and slow charging, but high energy density per volume batteries.
For example, when it comes to solar, you want a charge controller that can get as much energy as possible. Then once the fast charging elements near 100%, start charging slower, but more energy dense batteries. This will help to maximize what comes from the panels for user during the night.
Power Density ? (Score:2)
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If it can charge in seconds it does not need huge power density. If you could charge your phone in 1 minute than it only lasting 24 hours would be fine. If you could charge your car in 10 minutes than only having 100 mile range would be fine.
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Don't be so dense, h4rr4r is obviously an energetic power-user!
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Don't be so dense, h4rr4r is obviously an energetic power-user!
And he recharges rapidly.
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Unless I get at least 30:1 run time vs charge time for an electric vehicle with a 3 hour minimum run time, I'm not sold. As for the phone battery, 1 minute for 24 hours that's a 1400:1 ratio (run time vs charge time) If I could get that for a car, we'd drop gasoline in a heartbeat.
The Fine Print (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:The Fine Print (Score:4, Funny)
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... WITHIN logical...
would be more concise :-)
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Hey Spaham, there's a visitor for you out in the hall --- says his name is Zeno. You might need to go out and help him --- he seems to be having some trouble making it to the door.
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I find it cool that Zeno's paradoxes still aren't really resolved. We still don't know what spacetime and motion actually look like at Plank scale. Assuming motion is somehow quantized at small enough scale does answer Zeno, but it's not clear why that would be so or how it would work. But hey, maybe one day Zeno will finally catch his pet tortoise.
Motorola back in the game! (Score:2)
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and the TAZR MAXX
"imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone..." (Score:5, Funny)
imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second
I'd like to, but my fuses just blew, the connector in the phone melted down, there's a smell of burning plastic insulation in my room, and a small fire seems to have started burning here, so I have other things on my mind!
Re:"imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone... (Score:4, Funny)
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Apple's Lightning II connector coming soon...
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imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second
I'd like to, but my fuses just blew, the connector in the phone melted down, there's a smell of burning plastic insulation in my room, and a small fire seems to have started burning here, so I have other things on my mind!
Why is this rated funny instead of insightful? Moving more energy in less time is going to generate heat, lots of heat.
Also, instead of flawed batteries that seriously overheat we could have flawed batteries that explode.
the key is reaction surface area (Score:2)
Interesting, but.... (Score:2)
...do we ignore the first law of thermodynamics? If these batteries charge 1,000 times faster then they must put off 1,000 times the heat or so one would think under the law. Further, the largest collection of Lithium is sea water, but it is very inefficient to harvest existing at the ppm level.
you misunderstand circuitry and thermodynamics (Score:3)
.do we ignore the first law of thermodynamics? If these batteries charge 1,000 times faster then they must put off 1,000 times the heat or so one would think under the law.
The first law of thermodynamics says that energy isn't created or destroyed. It has nothing to do with charging rates. With respect to charging it just tells you that the stored energy added plus the losses (mostly heat) add up to the energy you supplied. (Second law says you have to lose SOMETHING to make the charging happen - though it
Somewhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
... Elon Musk has one hell of a rager over this. This could make electric cars that could go from Florida to New York on one charge, and recharge in similar time to a gas refill, a possibility.
Say you got 500 miles to a charge, which is a reasonable amount if these numbers are to be believed. That's the amount of miles driven by the average US driver in 2 weeks. So if the battery needs to be replaced after 8-10 charges, you're talking once a quarter. If the battery costs $250 and is easily user-replaceable, this isn't a big deal:
My quick, rough math says that if it lost 5% of the original maximum after every charge and the maximum charge of a brand new battery were 500 miles, 10 charges would come out to 3875 miles. If the battery can be produced for $250, that comes out to 15.5 miles to every $1 spent on the battery. Now, consider experiments are in progress to allow free/nearly free recharges, so the cost would really be reduced to just the battery. The current gas price I see out my window is $3.33/gal and my Scion xB gets about 30 MPG.
So, my Scion costs $3.33 to go 30 miles. The Tesla with a $250 battery would cost $2, and not explode the environment.
I'm sold. // of course these costs are pure conjecture until we know more.
Re:Somewhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
Recharging in the same time as a gas refill is unlikely to ever happen.
To go NY to Florida in an electric car will take on the order of 1MWh. To recharge this in 5 minutes (gas refill time) would require a cable transferring a power of 12MW. If we used 25,000 volts to do this (the voltage of overhead electrical lines for high speed electric trains) the current would be 480 amps. It's simply not practical to do while obeying the laws of physics.
Now think of how many people are fuelling up at a gas station at any given moment, and think about it if they are all drawing a power of 12 megawatts. There is no practical technology for the forseeable future that you can use to build a power grid capable of doing this. This is before we even get to safety issues of a power interconnect which is both high voltage and high current.
Also think of that 12MW figure for a moment, and you may get an inkling why personal motorised transport is absolutely unsustainable.
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> Recharging in the same time as a gas refill is unlikely to ever happen.
Agreed, but only because it is unnecessary, not because it is impossible. A 15 minute recharge every 4 hours (250 miles) is about as good as anyone really needs.
> To go NY to Florida in an electric car will take on the order of 1MWh.
Tesla Model S goes 265 miles on 85 Kwh for 3 miles/kwh, so the trip from Orlando to NYC (~1000 miles) would take about 333kwh which is about $40 worth of power (nothing unsustainable about that for th
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Swapping would still work with this kind of rapid degradation, as well (assuming the kind of costings detailed above). People may not want a full charge every time, in which case it doesn't matter if they swap with a degraded battery.
When a swapping location gets too many batteries at a certain level of degradation, they can simply adjust the price to encourage sales. When a battery is too degraded to sell, even at a discount, then it is ready to be shipped off (for recycling or whatever the case may be)
Don't you worry, never fear, robin hood will soon (Score:2)
"Don't you worry, never fear, robin hood will soon be here!"
"Well, where is he?"
Every damn week, there's another article here on Slashdot about some revolutionary energy tech, and every week it gets forgotten about, and in the meantime we can't even get our country to agree to build a pebble bed reactor to make electricity from all the nuclear waste we're currently throwing into the ocean.
I'll believe this advancement (like the super efficient or the super cheap solar cells), when it's available to the cons
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Pffttt....
Didn't you hear were in the midst of a Natual Gas Revolution! [npr.org]
You know what? (Score:2)
All I want on the side of my battery not is a logo that says, "King/Pikul" Start a jam band, name it King Pickle, profit.
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Namely "safety issues" ,
seems like forever since we've had to worry about batteries exploding and leaking acid, but batteries are kind of import to us as a race, so some risk in the consumer use of this technology may ultimately benefit us as the technology matures.
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Namely "safety issues" ,
seems like forever since we've had to worry about batteries exploding
Tell that to Boeing
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure the crackpot breakthroughs get ignored in the business realm and die off, while the really game-changing ones get scooped up by Duracell and Big Oil and friends before they can ever be patented...and die off.
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Wow! Did he win the slashdot awards for the longest article, and the longest article that was totally impossible to understand?
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My guess.
CC.
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The anode is the side current flows into, not necessarily the negative one. From wiki:
In a discharging battery or galvanic cell (diagram at right), the anode is the negative terminal because it is where the current flows into "the device" (i.e. the battery cell). This inward current is carried externally by electrons moving outwards, negative charge moving one way constituting positive current flowing the other way.
In a recharging battery, or an electrolytic cell, the anode is the positive terminal, which