They will never make batteries run for long time so in 100 years time laptops will run on food especially snacks which are always around and to keep them running you will feed laptops sweets and biscuits much like you already feed a small child to keep it running. There will be a special port for food. I am not a futurologist but I know how these things pan out.
Mmmm, delicious new sugar batteries keep gadgets up all night
Boffins have discovered they can improve battery capacity by using sucrose - aka table sugar - to create the anode material. Shinichi Komaba and his team at Tokyo University of Science made the discovery during their efforts to produce commercially viable sodium-ion batteries, according to Japanese tech site DigInfo.tv. The …
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Tuesday 25th September 2012 10:34 GMT Lee Dowling
They probably said that you'd "never store lightning" back in the 1700's. Batteries have come a long way very quicker to the point that even your average rechargeable battery has a capacity that alkaline batteries could only dream of when I was a kid. Hell, I remember playing with 400mAh NiCd cells and being able to set things on fire by shorting them out for very short periods (discovered accidentally, repeated scientifically). The power (and flow of current) in them was phenomenal compared to doing the same to even a new alkaline battery.
Batteries are nothing more than a chemical store of energy. The only problem is really the way we get that energy out (we want electricity, not explosions). Even a litre of petrol has a PHENOMENAL amount of energy in it if you use it properly, much, much more than you might think (hell, one litre of petrol can drive my 1 ton car for at least ten miles at 70mph after losses,imagine a 1-litre battery that could do that - car starter batteries tend to be in the 5-10 litre ranges, so your starting battery would be able to do 100 miles!).
It's not really a question of whether they will appear but how we handle them. In the same way that 1litre of petrol is dangerous, 1 litre of equivalent energy in any form is also potentially lethal, especially if mis-used or damaged. It would literally turn into a serious hazard in an accident and make it useful for terrorist actions, even.
There's no limit to battery power that we know of, and we've changed through so many materials that can do better jobs that we could probably work on improving them all for centuries yet. The problem is really the conversion to electricity and the safety of them.
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Tuesday 25th September 2012 13:15 GMT SiempreTuna
Is it that time of the month again already?
Thought we'd had this month's Battery-Miracle-Tech story ..
I assume El Reg has a fill-in-the-blanks proforma for them:
<name of publicity whore> has announced <buzzy name> which will give batteries a <random percentage> improvement in <price / capcity (delete as appropriate>.
Etc etc ..
Final line is always:
<buzzy name> will be a commercial reality within the next five years.
I've been reading these stories for .. seems like forever, but strangely my phone still doesn't go six months between charges and spare batteries still cost more than 10 cents.
Where's the Bullsh*t icon when you need it ..?
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Tuesday 25th September 2012 13:25 GMT Steve Knox
Re: Is it that time of the month again already?
It's not their fault. Vast improvements in battery power have been made in the last few decades.
But every time your "publicity whore(s)" go and make a better battery, instead of using it properly so it'll last longer, you just go and put more load on it and charge it improperly.
Now, if you took your iPhone battery and hooked it to an actual phone (say a Nokia 3310), the battery would last for about 60 years!
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Tuesday 25th September 2012 19:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Conventional
Na metal batteries run at >270K, as the metal has to be liquid.
Sodium ion is very similar to lithium ion, and these operate down to -20c as long as you don't charge them.
I expect the cells will need to be heated somewhat to charge but thats no biggie.
The interesting idea I did come up with is to monitor the cells using IR LEDs and a chip.
Each cell could be monitored within the pack by simply sensing the light reflected along the glass sheets, and detecting the periodic code it sends out.