
Student accidentally invents phone battery capable of 200k recharges - calchris42
http://www.businessinsider.de/student-accidentally-invents-a-400-year-battery-2016-11?IR=T
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paulddraper
Title should be changed to "Student accidentally invents phone battery capable
of 200k recharges"

The battery will neither power a phone for 400 years, nor retain a charge for
400 years. (It's especially probable to interpret this latter one, since it's
the only claim for which "400 years" is the right unit of measure.)

\---

PS. Specifying "phone" is a weird application. By their math, even if you had
your phone for a decade, you'd only recharge it 5k times.

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dang
Ok, we changed it, albeit a little late. Btw, anyone being driven batty by an
inaccurate title is welcome to email us for a quicker fix: hn@ycombinator.com.
We don't come close to seeing all the posts here, but we do see (and reply to)
emails.

Edit: turns out this thread is a dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12562392](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12562392)
though.

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tdb7893
I cannot wait for longer lasting batteries because they will make it so you
don't need to replace them in electric cars any more. Also it means instead of
getting a new rechargeable battery in every device you can just have some
standard ones and switch them from device to device as you get new ones, which
would reduce costs and waste a ton.

~~~
calchris42
For sure. The focus on "your cell phone battery" is a bit narrow. But I guess
just a simple to understand example.

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sharemywin
This seems like something that would still have commercial value even if it's
expensive. space travel, undersea, other hard to reach places.

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mistaken
The wording is a bit misleading in the article. The battery cannot power a
laptop for 400 years; but instead it could be used for (drained/recharged) for
that long considering a regular laptop battery.

~~~
bradleybuda
Safe to assume that it's intentionally misleading.

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Mathnerd314
Original press release with footage / interview:
[https://news.uci.edu/research/all-powered-
up/](https://news.uci.edu/research/all-powered-up/)

Paper:
[http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsenergylett.6b00029](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsenergylett.6b00029)

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gus_massa
Is there another report with a comparison of the charge/weight, charge/volume
and charge/price of this battery and an usual Li-Ion battery?

These are usual tradeoff. Nobody expect a mobile phone to be used more than 10
years, so if you design a battery to last only 10 years instead of 400 perhaps
you can improve the amount of charge.

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calchris42
Ahh, happy accidents.. an engineer's best friend.

