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Researchers Report Super-Powered Battery Breakthrough
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."
That was the most worthless infomercial ever.
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.
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.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I carry my phone in my pocket. I have to use a long life battery with my Galaxy Nexus to make it last more than eight hours off charge, which means the stupid thing has a big ugly hunchback cover on the back of it, so the enlarged battery will fit. But while that might be ugly, it's hardly suddenly too thick to fit in my pocket.
Remember we're only talking about thickening a phone by a millimeter or two to get something approaching a reasonable battery life. The current situation is absolutely ridiculous and has nothing to do with practicality or the ability to fit a phone in a pocket. It's purely looks. And it's a prime example of form being put ahead of function to an extreme degree.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
Namely "safety issues" ,
seems like forever since we've had to worry about batteries exploding
Tell that to Boeing
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.