Slashdot Mirror
'30 Year Laptop Battery' is Unscientific Myth
An anonymous reader wrote to mention the wonderful news: "A research group funded by U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory is developing a battery which can provide continuous power to your laptop for 30 years! Betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source..." Except, not so much. ZDNet's Mixed Signals blog with Rupert Goodwins explains why (as always) if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is: "The sort of atomic structures that generate power when bombarded with high energy electrons are the sort that tend to fall apart when bombarded with high energy electrons. While solar cells have the same problem, it's to a much lesser extent. There's a lot of research into making materials that don't suffer so much, but it remains a serious issue ... while it's true that a tritium-powered battery will eventually turn into an inert, safe lump of nothing much, and while it's also true that a modest amount of shielding will keep the radioactivity within the the battery the while, there's the small problem that if you break the battery during its life the nasties come out."
the nastiest came out and broke your grammar checker.
Yeah, my lap is exactly where I want to put something radioactive.
Mr. LaForge: We're trapped by the aliens!
Wesley Crusher: Wait! We only need to realize that the sort of atomic structures that generate power when bombarded with high energy electrons are the sort that tend to fall apart when bombarded with high energy electrons.
Mr. LaForge: That.... could.... destabilize the aliens death ray....!
Wesley: Yeah, just like in the academy.
Picard: Make it so.
I don't know about you ... but for ANYTHING radioactive that I'm going to be sticking on my lap I want more than a "modest" amount of shielding thank you very much.
don
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
Did an editor ACTUALLY CHECK on the facts of a story before posting?
Cue the porcine aviators...
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
When I was young, before the first war, we didn't have them fancy grammar checkers or spelling checkers. When we had a paper due for our teacher, we had to look up the ASCII codes manually (most of us memorized like our multiplication tables) while punching holes in cards to feed into our mechanical computer. The grammar and spelling checker was YOU! We didn't have batteries. We had to power our computers by connecting them to mills near powerful dams. And we liked it! Then we had to manually ink our ribbon before printing. And when we went to school, we often lost our papers because it was so cold. And the roads were uphill both ways!
Get off my lawn!
*shakes cane*
Yes, let's call it lawpoop's law. That sounds really good.
A larger pool of mutants means more chance of a favorable adaptation, right?
We can't be so selfish - think of the children.
Everyone talks about evolution but nobody does anything about it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Don't exaggerate. Plenty of technologies were working fine with tubes. The most significant thing was electrification.
Well it wasn't great at the start, but then we hooked the tubes up in series.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!