Degraded Electrodes Observed In Aging Batteries

schliz writes "Scientists have identified nanoscale changes in aging lithium-ion batteries that could be responsible for their degradation over time. By dissecting and examining dead batteries, they found that some lithium was irreversibly lost from the positive to negative electrode of dead batteries, and no longer participated in charging and discharging. They discovered that finely-structured nanomaterials on dead batteries' electrodes had coarsened in size, and theorise that the coarsening of the cathode may be responsible for the loss of lithium."

Comments

Re:degrading in other aging things

[slackbheep]

Have you noticed any surfaces becoming more coarse and perhaps bloated with age?

well, hey:

[eyenot]

my prostate is still healthy! go blahnabbernab on THAT!

Re:degrading in other aging things

[eyenot]

hey don't fret -- is your prostate healthy? cheers!

Re:Solar backup

[drinkypoo]

When did we get all the China shills around here? It seems like lately when I mention that China is the place to which we outsource [most of] our slavery, I get downmodded. Yet, it is a known fact that a great deal of the cheap plastic shit you will see on the shelves is made with literal slave labor. Chinese prison camps come in two flavors, rock-breaking and toy-assembling. Rent What Would Jesus Buy and in the extras you will get to witness the account of one woman who was imprisoned in China for the crime of being openly Christian. She was tortured, raped, and imprisoned for years longer than her sentence. While she was in one camp, she literally was put to work assembling Christmas Lights which were to be sold at a major US chain. The simple truth is that buying goods from China is supporting slavery, period, end of story. It doesn't really matter whether you buy from some ethical company, either; it's all supporting the Chinese economy and I doubt there are many Chinese goods which do not include components made with slave labor.

After the actual slave labor we also have that which is virtual slavery, situations where workers are denied their rights and often forced to work in ridiculous conditions. We have that here too, though. It's called Mexican labor. You don't have to pay any benefits and most of them will just roll over and take it if they are injured on the job since they fear deportation. They live umpteen to an apartment for economic reasons and are happy to have it due to what their country is like... you know, the country whose politics we've been tampering in ever since forever, the country where the results of our war on drugs can be seen most vividly. Immigrant laborers are actually better than slaves because employers don't lose anything when they get sick, they just pick up the next worker. And they'll work just as hard with the whip of a starving family as they will with the old-fashioned kind.

I buy stuff from China all the time, but as long as they are such terrible abusers of human rights, buying anything from China is an irresponsible promotion of slavery.