battery technologies

Stanford researcher Yi Cui looked across the field of transparent electronics and saw that all was not equal. While all other major electronics components--things like transistors, displays, and other circuitry--have been made transparent, no one had taken the time and effort to create a transparent power source. And you can’t have a fully transparent device without a transparent battery. So Cui made one.

With lackluster battery tech one of the biggest hurdles standing between existing energy economies and those of the green, renewable future, there's a lot of pressure on researchers to come up with the next big battery breakthrough. And pressure, it turns out, might be just the ticket. By exerting the kinds of super-high pressures found deep within the Earth on a unique compound, researchers at Washington State University's Pullman campus have created a novel new material with the capacity to store huge amounts of mechanical energy as potential chemical power.

It didn't take Japan's battery-powered Mira EV long to top itself. Last year the car set a record for the longest journey in an electric car without recharging, traveling 345.2 miles between Tokyo and Osaka on a single charge. Packing 8,320 cylindrical lithium-ion batteries, the Japan EV Club's Mira EV has now bested its own short-lived record, traveling 623.3 miles on a single charge this past weekend.