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Batteries Smaller Than a Grain of Salt
An anonymous reader writes "Lithium-ion batteries have become ubiquitous in today's consumer electronics — powering our laptops, phones, and iPods. Research funded by DARPA is pushing the limits of this technology and trying to create some of the tiniest batteries on Earth, the largest of which would be no bigger than a grain of sand. These tiny energy storage devices could one day be used to power the electronics and mechanical components of tiny micro- to nano-scale devices."
As exciting as this is, I would take this news... ... with a grain of salt.
The title says smaller than a grain of salt but the article says smaller than a grain of sand.
And what kind of salt are you talking about? Table salt, sea salt, pickling salt? Same goes for sand. Waikiki sand, Provincetown sand, Bali sand?
What would be nice is if there were some system of measurement that could be easily understood by the masses when talking about such sizes. For example, how many fractions of a Library of Congress would that be? Or maybe elephants. Elephants are always good. I once listened to a story on NPR about how much water is in the average cloud. The scientist (hydrologist?) involved used elephants to let the listener know how many elephants worth of water was being suspended above our heads when clouds are about.
Personally I prefer metric buttloads. Use that term and everyone knows what you're talking about.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It is already a pain to change AAA batteries, imagine what it is going to be like trying to change one of these things. Good forbid you drop the thing, or put it in the wrong way. Think, how many sides does a grain of salt have! That is going to the number of ways that someone is going to install it wrong!
Also, lets say you want to test it to see if it still has a charge. You put it on your tongue and it dissolves! Now your are stuck shelling out another 5 bucks to Energizer!