Power/Performance Bits: May 3


Nanowire batteries University of California, Irvine researchers invented a nanowire-based battery material that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times. Nanowires have long been sought as a battery material. However, these filaments are extremely fragile and don't hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, or cycling. In a typical lithium-ion battery, they expand and gro... » read more

Recharging The Battery


There are few technologies in today’s cutting-edge technological environment that have a difficult time finding new levels of performance. Battery technology is one of them. With the exception of a few experimental offerings, batteries and their performance metrics are relatively flat. There has been some progress, of course. But when compared to other technologies such as transistors, mem... » read more

Making Batteries Better


By Brian Fuller The world has changed dramatically in the 209 years since Alessandro Volta hunched over his table by candlelight and figured out how to capture energy in his voltaic pile, the first electric battery. What has changed little, however, is the battery itself. Since Volta’s conception, the battery has remained a cell with negative and positive electrodes, an electrolyte, and... » read more