Nanowires Boost Laptop Battery Life to 20 Hours

brianmed writes to tell us that Stanford researchers have created a new use for silicon nanowires that promise to reinvent lithium-ion batteries. "The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers. [...] The lithium is stored in a forest of tiny silicon nanowires, each with a diameter one-thousandth the thickness of a sheet of paper. The nanowires inflate four times their normal size as they soak up lithium. But, unlike other silicon shapes, they do not fracture."

Comments

Hundreds of pages?

[zippthorne]

From the article:

That's the first problem. Printers routinely report that they are low on ink even when they aren't, and in some cases there are still hundreds of pages worth of ink left.

Although I find it despicable that printers might under-report their ink capacity (though I always though it was a "buy ink" warning rather than a "put new ink in" warning. An important distinction, as you want to have fresh ink handy *before* you actually run out), I find it very difficult to believe that even the most unethical manufacture would under-report when hundreds of pages remain on a product that is only designed to handle circa 200 pages to begin with.

Now I have noticed, on a family member's HP, that it is printing color even when a page is pure black text. This seems particularly wasteful to me, and when I looked at it, I couldn't figure out if it was a setting, or just fantastically poor design decisions.