The Energy Crisis on Your Lap - Battery

[dArKeR]

Let’s face it: the biggest challenge for advanced road warriors today isn’t finding the nearest WiFi hotspot. It’s making sure that the battery doesn’t run out in the middle of a crucial download. Ironically, in our headlong rush to create sophisticated untethered computing, the most problematic technology turns out also to be the oldest: those nondescript metal cylinders that never seemed to be included with our Christmas toys.

SUDDENLY, HOWEVER, the quest for long-lasting portable power is on everyone’s mind, from blue-chip Silicon Valley venture capital firms to Japanese giants like Sony and Toshiba. And it looks like there are only two options: continued improvements in existing technology, or a major breakthrough, most likely miniature fuel cells that produce electricity using methanol as fuel.

Batteries are a very old technology—2,000 years ago, jewelers in Baghdad apparently used simple batteries to electroplate their creations with thin layers of gold or silver. The technology was reinvented early in the eighteenth century, when Alessandro Volta demonstrated the first Voltaic cell for Napoleon Bonaparte, giving us both the concept of the battery and the name of the unit by which electric potential is measured. In the 200 years since, the fundamental concept hasn’t much changed—only the materials within have evolved, growing increasingly exotic and culminating in the current power champion, lithium-ion.

http://msnbc.com/news/992103.asp?0cv=CB20

[politicat]

1. I remember reading about the fuel cell option in Scientific American

Bout a year ago.... it was for cell phones and Motorola was working on one that used Methane that came in little cartridges like fountain pen ink refills.

Me, I can't wait. Know a fellow writer who does everything on her Handspring visor since it uses AAAs and she can take it anywhere. Wish Apple would work on the R&D for it. My powerbook battery is good, but not great.

Politicat