Since it sounds so amazing, I guess there will be a catch. My bet is that those things are going to be extremely tough to manufacture. Kind of like graphene.

Anything that is electrically driven like mobile robots will need less power to move because they will weigh less. Or it's designers could keep the same weight and expand the operating range. I know this is early in the development but it sounds like a big deal.

They really make it sound like a panacea.

Well written article as well!!!
I wonder if this is another outcome of the Obama administration pumping money into battery technology?

So what is the energy density of a single Lithium Fluoride molecule?
So that we can know when these 30x this, and 1000x that, exaggerated salesman claims will end. Some actual test result Watt Hour per gram figures would be great too.

Lot of sales pitch without the numbers to back it up...

The power density is listed in the abstract linked to at the end of the article. 7.4 mW cm−2 μm−1. This is a news site not a scientific journal, so I don't see why you all are complaining

Batteries have two key components: the anode (minus side) and cathode (plus side).

Long ago, when the study of electronics involved understanding the vaccuum tube - diodes, triodes, pentodes, cathode ray tubes - we were taught that electrons were emitted from a heated cathode and received by the anode after crossing the gap. The screen of the CRT in an old fashioned television has a positive charge on itm and a scanning electron beam was emitted from the cathode end which was heated by a filament. In energy saving CRT tv's, this filament is always on. Electrons have a negative charge, therefore the cathode is the negative electrode, and the positively charged anode is the positive electrode.

I'd like to know who was the smartass who turned those properties of electrodes around, because now I'm finding out that everybody has it wrong, but that's the way that they're teaching it in schools today.

To repeat: the cathode is the minus side and the anode is the positive side.

Great. Perpetual bugs in every room. Nobody will have anything to hide ever again.

I've had the same little red LED flashlight on my keychain for at least 10 years. I rarely use it but still...

Leakage data?

@baudrunner, I am SO glad to finally hear someone else ask this question after wondering about it 35 years ago myself. I did some research back in high school and found out that poor old Ben Franklin is the culprit. He had no way of knowing which way the "particles" were flowing, he just knew charge was moving and he just did the old "eeny-meany-miney-mo" thing and picked one end and called it positive and the other end negative. If he'd just guessed the other way, it would be so much easier to study :-)

Well written article as well!

It's not well written article, because it describes only the (potential) advantages of technology, but not technology itself. Therefore it's a typical PR article - not the informative article. But it definitely fulfilled its propagandistic purpose, because the layman sheep like you are still impressed with it without actually realizing the actual principle of new technology. In contemporary society the financing of research is what is important, not what this research is actually about. You - as a layman - are just supposed to remain quiet and to pay for it. If you would understand it, you could start to ask the questions - and this is not, what is desirable here.

But StolenTree, that's a power density / volume, not an energy density...or what people are REALLY asking: specific energy.

It really can't be that hard for them (the abstract) to give us some kind of idea about the specific energy it's capable of. I assume it's not that good in SOME area or they'd be trumpeting hard numbers. I bet it's a great fit for certain applications.

that's a power density / volume, not an energy density

You can find the details in publicly accessible supplementary info. It contains the power density/energy density diagram, which removes the need of all speculations and discussions about it: you have both densities pictured there together with their mutual relation.

Somewhere within the associated PDF I read that they actually lose 5% total energy density per cycle. Good for some applications but if you're thinking rechargable it's not impressive.

In addition, the more intimate mixture of cathodic and anodic materials you prepare, the better explosive you will get at the case of accidental shortcut.

sounds like the graphene capacitor idea, what about scaling it up in size? to power a car say.

But why? Would you pay for a battery, which will lose half of its capacity during one week of daily recharging?

Maybe that structure is general, so its idea could be applied for more persistent batteries?

"A driver could use a cellphone powered by these batteries to jump start a dead car battery" Who writes this stuff? I doubt the circut of a cell phone could handle the 100 plus amps current and you jump start an engine not a car battery. Why not say "A cellphone sized battery using this technology could charge a dead car battery"?

I imagine the article provides some details... well, what do you know, it does. ;-)

@baudrunner
"...cathode polarity depends on the device type..."
Clip from Wikipedia page on Cathode.

Show me a 4" Cube that can output 1000 watts for 2 Hours and I will throw 500k at this project.

but the person who decided that the negative particle or charge was negative, and that the positive was positive, did get it wrong.

They didn't get it wrong. Calling one side 'negative' and the other 'positive' is a purely arbitrary choice as long as you stick with it from then on (much like - and exactly for the same reason - as calling one side of a magnet 'south' and the other 'north').
If you exchange 'negative charge' for 'positive charge' in every textbook you still have perfectly valid textbooks.

Show me a 4" Cube that can output 1000 watts for 2 Hours

A 4x4x4in cube of gasoline can supply you 1000 Watts for 7.5 hours.

I'll PM you details where you can send your money.

Show me a 4" Cube that can output 1000 watts for 2 Hours

A 4x4x4in cube of gasoline can supply you 1000 Watts for 7.5 hours.

This is about the storage of energy and not the production.

Why not say "A cellphone sized battery using this technology could charge a dead car battery"?

Because it can't.

The charts in the supplementary material show that it's slightly worse in energy density compared to lead acid batteries, so in order to charge up a dead car battery you would need one that is slightly larger and heavier than it.

There's about 4 Watt-hours of energy in a modern cellphone battery, and given the lower energy density of this invention, about 1.5 Wh which is just about enough to crank a car engine for two seconds which is not enough to start it cold.

So the entire paragraph is just hyperbole.

This is about the storage of energy and not the production.

Well, then you should be a bit more careful about wording your investment abilities.

@ValeriaT,
Thanks for taking the time to read and find the pertinent link. Still don't know the specific energy, but we know lots about the energy density. Interesting that this thing behaves truly like a hybrid battery/supercap. It has a steep voltage drop like a capacitor, but only about half as much.
We also know its Achilles heel now (at least in this early version):
"There is a sharp cutoff in the maximum energy density of the supercapacitors, around 4.0 µWh/cm2 µm. Six of our microbatteries can achieve a higher energy density than 4.0 µWh/cm2 µm, with the maximum being 15 µWh/cm2 µm, an almost 4X increase. The energy densities of the microbatteries are initially superior to the supercapcitors, but lose an average 5% total energy density after each cycle. "

That 5% loss per cycle gets kinda big, kinda fast. :-)

@FainAvis: That's just bullshit. You have to take what you read on Wikipedia with a grain of salt. The writer is justifying, and thereby perpetuating, the misinformation fed to him at his school. He is reiterating without understanding, and trying to impress you with his mastery of the knowledge. Typical.

Metals are defined as nuclei in a sea of electrons. Electrons are the majority mobile charge carriers. Einstein won his Nobel prize for his explanation of the photo-electric effect, in which he described how bombarding a sodium block in a Bell jar connected to a circuit with an ammeter with UV rays caused electrons to leave the sodium block and migrate through the circuit. Cathodes in a CRT tube were often coated with sodium to generate those electrons when they were heated. Cathodes are ALWAYS the negative pole, whether they are on a battery or in a vacuum tube, or what have you. The article is simply wrong.

it describes only the (potential) advantages of technology, but not technology itself. Therefore it's a typical PR article - not the informative article. But it definitely fulfilled its propagandistic purpose

-You mean like Andrea Rossi and his gadget? Its ok for rossi to keep his ecat a secret because of the money he stands to make, but not these guys who are doing it for the same reason?

I smell double standard.

By the way, Star Scientific has a company to commercialize their pion-to-muon fusion process, a website, backers, and such. Why hasnt anyone done the same thing with magnetic motors? They should be far easier to produce, like the one in the vid you posted of that iranian who keeps one behind his couch.
http://www.starsc...through/

A friend and I put together the $32 and bought the paper itself...scrubbing aside most technical details, the main thing that can be put here is that the properties that make this a great battery are that instead of taking alternating plates anode-cathode, it's actually integrated on a much smaller scale, where the particles of the anode and cathode sides assemble individually to form in such a way that these materials are ideal for the transport of ions.

The problem? This "assembly" I'm talking about, is really many complex steps of difficult chemistry. It's not something that's going to go to mass manufacturing within the next year or three easily. In fact, even when it does, they're likely still going to be a niche market because of the complexity involved.

You mean like Andrea Rossi and his gadget? Its ok for rossi to keep his ecat a secret because of the money he stands to make

If his device comes to nothing which is very likely to be, he probably won't get a penny to his name.

So much potential can only be more dangerous if there is a 787 type overheat. I don't want my pocket to reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit in a microsecond.

I want my phaser now then.

I want my phaser now then.

No you dont because this might happen
http://www.youtub...02JG-QGE

Since it sounds so amazing, I guess there will be a catch. My bet is that those things are going to be extremely tough to manufacture. Kind of like graphene.

Initially, maybe. But after we teach micro-bots to do those tricks, then ...

Why NOT have some pipelines with water running at a specific height

Because the magma levels tend to change. So your 'specific height' tends to change.

Taking energy out of volcanoes that way might also not be a good idea. You'd be cooling the upper surface of the magma. If that solidifies you've created a plug. Magma doesn't like to be plugged up. In such cases volcanoes tend not to just break out but explode rather violently sooner or later.

Taking energy out of volcanoes that way might also not be a good idea. You'd be cooling the upper surface of the magma

And yet... and yet... if you had only done a little research you would have had something useful to contribute...
http://www.takepa...s-energy
http://www.renewa...tricity/

-Another lost opportunity. Sigh.