The headline couldn’t be more attractive—“A Laptop 40-Hour Battery?” Alas, all this is just speculation raised from some juiced theoretical prototypes at the moment. Regardless, in the ScienceNOW article by Robert Service, a research team, lead by Yi Cui, a materials scientist at Stanford University, is cited as developing a battery anode from nanowire strands of silicon which can hold a charge up to 10 times longer than conventional carbon anodes. What’s holding this technology back from reaching your laptop’s battery? Designing a cathode that is equally able to hold a charge that is 10 times greater than current technology. Let’s just hope that these new 10x batteries don’t produce 10x-sized laptop fires.—Dave Prochnow

A new type of solar cell may one day prove so inexpensive and flexible, it could be used to turn your clothes into portable power sources—keeping you warm or cool, or charging your phone. Materials scientist Paul Alivisatos and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, mixed P3HT, a plastic that conducts electricity, with nanorods made from cadmium selenide, a semiconductor material. This mixture was then "spin-cast" onto a glass base, a process similar to swirling a wineglass so that the wine spreads into a thin film.