
UCI chemists create rechargeable battery with greatly lengthened lifespan - Sami_Lehtinen
https://news.uci.edu/research/all-powered-up/
======
maga
A free startup idea: keep watch on progress made on promising research.
Examine.com for tech research in a way, where one can just search for say
"batteries" and see all the relevant research directions and their current
results on key metrics, say, kWh per kg, charging speed, etc.

~~~
nine_k
And sell this as a subscription service? I wonder how many users there might
be.

~~~
maga
I'm positive it can make its creators filthy rich with the special journalist
subscription that offers automatically generated dramatized versions of the
research updates. In the dramatized version, every researcher becomes either a
child prodigy, a person struggling with social issues, or Elon Musk; every
research is a serendipitous breakthrough and destined to save the world at
least once; all the while meeting a strong opposition from the established
corporations, governments, and other wrong-doers.

But seriously, I'd subscribe to such a service, just out of curiosity if
nothing else.

~~~
andy_ppp
These things are sent to journalists for free by university marketing
departments/people who want grants. Also the size of the market you are
suggesting is not going to be worth pursuing.

~~~
maga
Well, then we sell it to the marketing departments/grant seekers--problem
solved.

> Also the size of the market you are suggesting is not going to be worth
> pursuing.

If you mean the journalists, that was a (half) joke, of course. But the people
who would be interested in this "examine.com for tech" are, I believe, an
audience worth pursuing. I find it too cumbersome to weigh all the
monetization options here, but even if we only go with the subscription, I
believe there would be enough users to sustain such project. If people are
willing to pay for general purpose news such as WSJ, I'm sure there will be
enough of us, geeks/nerds/techies, willing to pay twice as much to keep in
close touch with the progress, without having to dig through all the bullshit
every time we hear about a world saving breakthrough.

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rkangel
One day, one of the 'potentially disruptive' battery technologies is going to
get developed all the way to production. Surely. Right?

~~~
jonathanstrange
Well, I guarantee you that no company will ever develop a battery that lasts
200 years. Not because it's not technically feasible, but because they
wouldn't sell enough batteries.

Pretty simple.

~~~
vorotato
You don't think a phone manufacturer would do this if it were affordable
enough?

~~~
ende
How do phone manufactures get their customers to upgrade so often?

~~~
bkmartin
They make everything else better. If there was a battery that lasted for such
a long time then phone would have them and we would just swap from one handset
to another when we switch phones. Plus, people are really good at breaking
phone screens yet they are trying to come up with one that is shatterproof. If
you could use "lifetime" battery it would make someone very rich even if for a
short while...somebody would definitely work that business angle.

~~~
ende
I agree someone would, but it probably wouldn't be Apple or Samsung.

------
mhb
Frequency of Positive Words in Science Abstracts Has Increased 880% in 4
Decades:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556372)

~~~
qwtel
how does that compare to increase in frequency of positive words in _all_
published texts? (maybe excluding youtube comments...)

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MrPatan
That's it, I'm filtering all "news" about batteries.

~~~
jbb555
This last day or two I have had about 10 people in my facebook feed excitedly
post a link to an article about how some scientist has "discovered" that if
you cook a potato you can power a led lightbulb off it for 40 days.

And then going on about how this is wonderful for the 3rd world because they
can grow their own potatoes instead of us having to ship expensive polluting
batteries to them.

When I point out that the potato is irrelevant and the power is being
generated by using up the zinc electrode and if you are going to ship them
zinc electrodes for this it's no different to shipping very old, very poor
batteries I just get told off for being so negative and how "I'm sure they've
thought of that".

Ugh.

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cletus
Better title that seems to apply to all battery related research:

Battery researchers try to make name for themselves with vague announcement of
something that has an at most 5% chance of being commercial in 10 years.

Honestly, I have battery-research-announcement fatigue at this point. It seems
there's a publish-or-perish thing going on or someone is just angling for a
grant.

------
pkolaczk
It would be interesting to know the weight and cost per capacity of these
batteries. Capacitors have almost unlimited cycle count but they can store
only tiny amounts of energy, so that makes them somehow useless for powering
consumer devices or cars. It seems like the hardest thing in batteries is to
get all of the following at the same time: low cost of materials and
manufacturing, safety, high energy density, and high durability / high cycle
count, high power output / quick charging.

~~~
nine_k
High energy density and safety are somehow mutually contradictory. It's very
tricky to have a lot of energy packed into a small volume and not let it be
quickly released in a blast.

Quick charging is also tricky. If you have a 10 Ampere-hour battery and want
to charge it in 15 minutes, you can't have your average charging current below
100 A. This takes really thick wires, and will release a lot of heat.

------
lightedman
What caught my attention more was this bit at the bottom of the article:
"Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus ISDN line"

So advanced, yet still using a horrible and overly-expensive data transfer
line...

------
chiefalchemist
Great.

But I just wish science would spend less time self-annointing itself as our
saviour when such "discoveries" are accidents, if not luck.

It's as if winning to lottery makes you a mathematical genius.

~~~
dEnigma
As Louis Pasteur said: "In the fields of observation chance favors only the
prepared mind.", more commonly quoted as "Fortune/Luck favors the prepared
mind.". Blind luck alone won't do you any good most of the time, you have to
have the training and vision to realize what you're looking at.

------
jopython
We need a revolution in Battery technology if we were to get rid of our
dependence on fossil fuels.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
Batteries don't generate power, they only store it. We still need to get the
power from somewhere, and for the foreseeable future, that will have to
include fossil fuels.

~~~
kazinator
But fossil fuels do also solve the problem of storage due to their energy
density. One reason you put gas into a gas tank is not only is that a source
of energy, but it stores a lot of it in a small space. The tank is also just a
cheap steel container that whose capacity doesn't diminish with number of
refills.

If you can replace that with a battery with all the same properties: cost,
space, weight, durability and so on, that does have an impact.

The energy for filling that battery _can_ come from fossil fuels, but doesn't
have to. We have hydro, wind and solar.

------
tinganho
And what's the capacity?

~~~
kazinator
This article is more about the service life of the battery not about charge
capacity. (Though, of course, charge capacity would good to know: how does
this compare to a Li-Ion of comparable weight or space.)

I imagine that the prototypes they are working with don't have great capacity.
For that you need clever manufacturing to miniaturize the storage elements and
pack a lot of them into a small space.

------
gabemart
I believe this is the paper:

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

The headline, while not outright lying, is clearly playing on ambiguity to
suggest a more sensational story

The "student" is a doctoral student with multiple previous publications (and
not, say, a 17 year old high school student)

"Lasts 400 years" refers to the battery's potential ability to withstand a
very high number of recharge cycles while maintaining capacity (and not, say,
that it can supply energy from a single charge for 400 years)

~~~
DiabloD3
> Lasts 400 years

Still a lot better than 3-5 for existing techs. The battery would essentially
be immortal. Perfect for large scale deployable for national power grids.

~~~
steventhedev
3-5 years under ideal conditions. Stick a battery in a phone/laptop that
regularly gets used in the heat and it will give up the ghost within a year.
It's not even so much the ultimate lifetime that matters so much as the longer
95% capacity life, which is _much_ shorter now. I wouldn't be surprised if
this also has some major catch, like manufacturing cost, heat degradation, or
instability under mechanical stress. So while it could be an really important
discovery, I'll remain skeptic until I have a laptop battery that lasts for
longer than 12 hours after a year of heavy use in a hot, humid climate.

~~~
funkyy
All phones I had lasted at least 3-4 years of constant extensive use. In my
Samsung Omnia, I had to change a battery after 3 years just and I was using a
lot of it - especially as a GPS unit. The battery fault was also my wrongdoing
in this case.

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laurent123456
> It was on a whim that Thai coated a set of gold nanowires in manganese
> dioxide and a Plexiglas-like electrolyte gel.

So not "accidentally".

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Such a cynic. I'm sure people accidentally coat their gold nanowires in
manganese dioxide and Plexiglas-like electrolyte gels all the time. ;)

