Batteries Are Included

to talk about something that has to do with electricity. Yes, in fact, we're going to talk about batteries and why you know, I think in any discussion about the future and we talk about like the amazing electronics we have right now in the present, there's always this discussion that happens about why aren't batteries better yet? Yeah, people overlook the fact that batteries are awesome. They like, they don't pay attention to batteries being such an integral part of

all the technologies we really enjoy. Well, it's really easy also to to kind of wench on about how, you know, oh, my iPhone only keeps a charge for a day. It keeps a charge for a day, it keeps a charge at all, Like you can unplug it from the wall and it still works. Yeah, that's pretty incredible in itself. I mean, imagine if every electronic device you owned had to constantly be plugged into the power grid in order to work, or have an internal combustion engine or something

like that. Everything is, everything is either connected by cables or has some other form of generating power. But on the battery lets us store energy for later use, right, So you don't have to use all this energy now. You can use it later if you want. You can use in it, use it at different times later on. And that that's actually pretty incredible. It it enables all kinds of things we don't even take the time to think about. That's right. So batteries they share a lot

in common with another technology, the fuel cell. Fuel cells are differ from batteries, and that with fuel cells you keep adding fuel into the compartments of the fuel cell and then you generate electricity. And you have to keep filling up the fuel cell with fuel in order for it to continue to generate electricity. Batteries have an electrochemical reaction at the heart of them, just like a fuel cell does, but everything is contained within the battery itself. Right.

Batteries are, at bottom, I would say, a good way to put it, Is there an easy way to get electricity from chemistry? Yes? Yeah, So you have these chemicals that are reacting to produce an excess of electrons, something that happens with certain chemical reactions. So you get this excess of electrons that are gathering on one side of the battery that's the anode side, and then you have an electrical difference between the anode side of the battery

and the cathode side of the battery. Right, So if you think about a battery with two sides, the anode side has all these little minor symbols on it. Yeah, and those minor symbols, if they could, would really love to go to the opposite end of the bat right. It's it's almost as if you've got a pipe full of water that's tilted way up on one side at the an outside and down at the bottom is the cathode side, right, and there's something that's blocking the water

from running down that pipe. So if you were to create a pathway, a different path that has lot lots of little curly cues and crazy straw like uh contraptions and maybe even a little water wheel in there, but it led to that bottom side and you allowed gravity to do the work. The direct route down to the bottom would be blocked off, but this other pathway would be open the water would flow through. That's kind of

similar to what happens with a circuit. A circuit is where you've built a pathway for electrons to move from the anode to the cathode, so that you have the electrons moving over into that to fill up the holes, the positive slots on the opposite side of the battery, and while they're in motion, you can make them do work,

turn those little water wheels, the little electron wheels. If you don't if you don't have anything, if you don't have a load attack to the circuit, you're gonna burn out that battery really quickly because all all it's doing is electrons are just going to rush from one side to the other through this pathway. But by putting a load on there, then the electrons have to do work

along the way. So that might be something as simple as lighting an led, or it could be something as complicated as playing my favorite music on my MP three player, because that it's drawing its power from the battery. Here's the thing about these electrochemical results, right you know the electrochemical reactions. You get these, you get this stuff that essentially becomes a NERT. Right, it's no longer able to produce the electrons needed to continue this reaction. You're essentially

using up the useful chemicals within the battery. They're turning into something that is no longer going to generate those electrons. This is when the battery goes dead, when you've completely drained the charge and there's nothing there's not enough there uh, not enough active chemicals left within the battery to keep it going. So you know, you might have a battery like you may have used a flashlight, where it starts

going dim before it goes out. It's because the battery is able to still generate some electricity flow, but not enough to continuously power that that bulb. Now, that's if you have what's called a primary cell battery or a single use battery. But there are also batteries called secondary cell batteries. These are rechargeable batteries. You're essentially reversing the chemical reaction by reversing the flow of electricity. That's right, You reverse the polarity. So you just think about it

working the opposite way. Whereas when the battery is discharging, you're having electrons flowing out of one end to the other and doing work on the way. Uh. To make it go back the other way, you put work into the battery to force electrons to go back from the cathode to the anode. Right now. The issue here is that as you do this over and over, you start to lose some of the active ingredients inside this battery

and they start degrading. Yeah, so eventually the battery will still be dead, or at least will be It will store only enough juice for it to be moderately useful, and then you have to replace it with a new battery anyway, But it does mean you can reuse the same battery multiple times before that actually happens. It's not like you know, most batteries have lots of cycles charge cycles they can go through before they're they're inactive. But yes,

that that is the major difference. So a primary cell, once it's used up, that's it. You cannot recharge it. You've got to toss it away, especially since most of these chemicals when they're done are corrosive and will eventually start to eat through the casing of the battery. Itself and can cause damage to people in property. Well, when you think about a battery, it's kind of amazing that

they're as safe as they are because what is a battery. Well, it's a huge amount of potential energy stored up into a tight little space. Yeah. Yeah, you've got to essentially was amounts to a paste that can create this this chemical reaction. Although this is why, i mean, one of the reasons why you don't generally want to apply say fire to batteries. Oh yeah, and why sometimes batteries can

catch on fire. Sure, yeah, yeah. There's also issue with other basic things in electronics, Like you've probably heard the term resistance. Uh, generally, we we talked about resistance in the way that that something will start to generate heat because there's there's not a perfect path for the electrons to flow through. There's going to be some energy lost

in the form of heat. And uh, if you're charging a a secondary cell battery for too long, or if you have placed a rechargeable battery in the wrong type of charger, then you can overcharge one of those batteries and you end up generating a lot of resistance and damaging the battery in the process. Which could result in something as catastrophic as a fire, or it could just significantly decrease the useful life of that rechargeable battery. Either way,

it's a negative outcome. This one is obviously way more negative than the other one. But yeah, that's an issue. Okay, So let's talk about what are the main ways of making batteries today. But main oh you mean like the different types. Yeah, sure, okay, So we got alkaline cell. Those are the probably the those are the most common. Yeah, if you go out to the store and buy you some double A batteries to probably alkaline cell. If it if it doesn't say rechargeable on them, then they are

most likely alkaline batteries. There are also lithium non rechargeable batteries those those do exist too, so those are also primary cell batteries. But uh, you know, if it in general, you're gonna see alkaline ones which are using sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide as the electrolyte and like we said, not rechargeable. They produce about one point five four volts and the chemicals created as the battery produces electricity are corrosive. These are the ones that are gonna eat through that

zinc case eventually and possibly cause damage. They have to be really careful when when you get rid of them. They are the most widely used batteries in the world. They're inexpensive relatively speaking. I know that anyone who has gone to a convenience store because they desperately needed to get those double A batteries for something or or mine is always getting like the nine volt battery for the

smoke detector. When I realized that, oh it's beeping, I need to go out and get a battery in the closest place is this is this convenience store, then it feels like it's the most expensive thing I've ever seen in my life. But in general, they're They're much more practical and cheap than say, the chargeable batteries often are okay. But let's say you go to traffic court and you do what they actually tell you to do, but nobody does, which is take the battery out of your cell phone.

What's in that battery? Ah, So those are lithium ion batteries. These are the batteries that okay, so weill. Alkaline batteries are technically the most popular batteries in the world. The ones that people are having more and more experience with these days tend to be in the lithium ion side because it would be a huge pain in the butt to have to change out the double as in your cell phone. Yeah, not that there aren't phones out there that do that kind of thing. Certainly, you know you

need a good burner phone then, obviously. But now lithium ion batteries are rechargeable. They are UM. They are often found in things like computers and electronics UM as well as other places. They store about hundred fifty what hours per kilograms, so their energy density is pretty good, especially compared to some of the other batteries. Lithium ion are sort of the primo consumer rechargeable batteries these days. Yeah, there there are some people would say this is the

barrier that's holding us back. Right the lithium ion is as good as we can do right now. But there are people who are working on creating better battery technologies in the future, and we're going to talk a lot about those in just a little bit. But right now, lithium I on I mean, that's when you look at the different kinds of batteries that are out there, and

the energy density energy densities. Really we're talking about how much energy is packed in per unit of weight, and when it comes to packing a punch, lithium ion has one of the bigger punches in the game. Yeah. Even then, it's typically described in terms of a few hundred watt hours per legram. Yeah, you're not. We're not at a point where it's equivalent to say, the amount of power you would generate from an internal combustion engine with a car.

But but the voltage isn't bad for these guys compared to the size of those alkaline batteries. We're talking like four volts here. So, uh, that's for for a regular lithium ion cell. Okay, But let's say I pop open the hood of my old car, my old, rusty, beat up car, and look at the battery in there. What is it? Probably that's more than likely than not a

lead acid battery. So that we're not talking about electric vehicles or hybrid vehicles necessarily here, but in your classic internal combustion engine that needs to have a battery so that it can fire off the spark plugs and and also operate all the cabin electronics. That kind of stuff. You're talking about a lead acid battery. These do not have a very good energy density. No, not at all hours per kilogram. Compare that back to the lithium ion.

It's just not doesn't pack a huge wallum. No, What these things are really good at is hanging out and then giving you a big jolt right when you need it. Yeah, and a last a really long time, and you know it's it's another one of those things where if you start to run out of juice, you really need to go and get a new battery. You're not going to be recharging these like I'm sure most of us have been a situation either where we had to get a jump start from someone or we helped someone else get

a jump start from our vehicles. So usually that means you just give it enough electricity for the vehicle to to start up so you can get it to the closest place where you can get a replacement battery. But yeah, lead acid, and you know it's pretty much what sounds like. You've got some electrodes made out of lead and you've got sulfuric acid as a as a component. So this is also a battery you do not want to bust open Um, it's got calastic material and don't give it

to your baby to play with. No, this is dangerous stuff. After that, you've also got nickel based batteries, don't you like You used to have nickel cadmium a lot. Now you've got nickel metal hydra yep. And these are often used in hybrid vehicles. They use rare earth materials. We talked a lot about that in our last episode about solar powered vehicles, the idea of rare earth elements and why that's such a big issue in electronics. Uh, it's

a big issue with batteries as well. There are a lot of different batteries that are reliant upon some form of rare earth element in as part of the components. They also combine these rare earth elements with some some stuff that's a lot more common, like nickel being a big one, aluminum, cobalt, other stuff as well. They store about a hundred wide hours per kilogram, so again not as energy dense as lithium ion, but much more so than say lead acid. And they also are rechargeable, so

you can just uh buy these there. There are several that are in the same kind of style as alkaline batteries. So most of the time, when you see a rechargeable battery that's like a double a rechargeable battery ends up being a nickel metal h hydride. So those are your basic types. I mean there are others as well. Of course, we didn't even go into the historic batteries like voltaic piles and all that kind of stuff, which is fascinating.

You don't really use those to power a laptop. Might you might you might use it as a science fair project, right to build to build your own homemade battery, But yeah, it's not something that's going to be used in any real capacity for modern conveniences or anything like that. Okay, well, let's talk about the problems that exist with the batteries we have today and how could batteries be improved for future uses. So that energy density thing, yeah, that's a

big one. That's a big limiting factor. It's big, especially for say like hybrid or electric vehicles. Sure. Yeah, if you you know, one of the complaints a lot of people had, or at least one of the things like a misgiving people have about electric vehicles is this idea of I don't want to be driving this vehicle and then run out of charge and then be stranded somewhere. Uh. And then even if I'm someplace where I can plug in, I'm stuck there for hours on end until I get

a full charge. Never mind the fact that most of us drive well below the driving range of one of these electrical vehicles in our day to day activities. So if you're talking about using an electric vehicle for just your daily driving, like you know, you're driving around from to and from work, that kind of stuff, generally speaking, you're pretty much okay because you can just recharge at night and you're fine. It's when you're when you're want to go on an extended trip then it might become

more of a concern. I think. Also, most people who have who have driven a gas engine car have at some point run out of gas because they really thought that they should go to Starbucks first before they hit the gas station. He doesn't, He doesn't mean empty, E means enough. Yeah, nobody who used to say that until you had to call Triple Aid help him out too many times? One too many times? Yeah. Um. So yeah.

Here's the thing though, with energy densities, there's only so much we can do because unlike microprocessors, you know, you know More's law, this idea that within every two years or so, the power of microprocessors doubles because we are able to cram more discrete components onto these these chips were able to manaturize. That doesn't apply to batteries because we're talking about chemical reactions, not some sort of electronic circuitry.

So we can make electronics more efficient so they sip less power, but we can't, you know, just make a magical maturization machine for batteries and get the same kind of advances that we've seen on the electronic side. Although certainly different chemicals are more efficient at creating these reactions,

so we can't. We can't make chemicals. We can't make these same chemicals better at what they do necessarily, but we can experiment with different chemicals and different approaches to making these chemicals and and exploiting different physical properties of materials to make better batteries. In any case, it's going to be really hard to create a battery that comes close to compete eating with the energy density of gasoline. Yes, um, that's one of the main appeals of gasoline today. I mean,

it's it's cheap and it's got great energy density. So the energy density of gasoline is something like twelve thousand or thirteen thousand watt hours per kilogram. Compare that to the lithium ion batteries, which store, as we said, like a hundred and fifty or maybe a few hundred watt hours per kilogram. So it's a huge difference. If you're trying to make electric cars an attractive proposition, increasing the

energy density of electric batteries is huge. What you end up with is this large, extremely heavy brick in your car that won't let you drive as far as the tank of gasoline. Now, as you've said, that's exactly it's exactly right that people have misconceptions about the range anxiety

of electric cars. Well, there's also there's also the issue that you're talking about twelve thousand and thirteen thousand watt hours per kilogram energy density of gasoline, but an internal combustion in and is not as as efficient as an electric motor. That's exactly right. So a lot of that energy is lost as heat in an internal combustion engine. But still that difference is gigantic, and we'll talk about some ways that energy density gap might be closed by

different battery designs. But we've still got a lot more problems that batteries have that we have to contend with. Some depending upon what approach we use, some of these are bigger concerns than others. Some batteries are more prone to some of these problems than others. So one of them is the self discharge problem. So this is where you've taken a battery of the package, you put it into some form of electronics, and it starts to essentially

leak electricity. It's it's it's leaking its effectiveness, and depending upon the type of battery, that could be significant. We're talking like up to in the first day losing the charge, so it goes from a charge to eighty percent charge. You haven't even turned anything on, You've just plugged the battery in and let sit just from the circuit being completed. Now, not all of them are are prone to this. Nickel metal hydride are particularly vulnerable to self discharge, but not

everything is. And if you if you are storing stuff in a cool not cold, but a cool environment, then you you slow this down because we're talking about chemical reactions. Chemical reactions tend to happen faster when you apply heat, and they tend to be slower when you take heat away. But you don't want to put batteries in the fridge or freezer because then you just slow it down so much that it's going to take you forever for the juice to start flowing when you actually want to use

the batteries. I've heard this myth before that you should put batteries in the freezer to prolong their life. Apparently that is not true. In fact, the battery manufacturers have facts on their website telling you not to do this because it actually doesn't improve it. And in fact, if you put a battery in the freezer, they say that the condensation that forms on it could cause damage to the batteries and in fact cut down on its its

life well. And when you see with electric vehicle producers, one of the things they talk about is testing the electrical vehicles in uh in cold environments because there's this concern that the cold weather would retard the function of the battery, so you wouldn't get your vehicle started when you would want to. So let's say you're heading out the door to go to work and you have to wait, you know, a half hour for the car to warm up enough to be able to drive it. That would

be another example. Then you have the memory effect. This is when you recharge a device, and each time you're recharging it, it's not quite going all the way back to percent normally because you have the old rechargeable batteries really had this problem where let's say I've got my cell phone and I plug it in and I let it charge up to and I think that's good enough. I need my phone. I'm going on the way way, and I unplugged it and I go on, I'm married

a little way. The next time I plug in my cell phone, it charges up, but now the new one is just the percent of what it's original full capacity was, So it gets up eighty percent of its original full capacity, and that's the stops. Yeah, I don't I don't have access to that extra power. So now I'm saying, you know, this phone used to give me like twenty four hours of service before I had to plug it in, but

now I'm only getting like eighteen or sixteen hours or whatever. Um. That would be the memory effect, And with some batteries it's worse than with others. There are other things that come into play here. Sometimes it's not just the battery. There might be a sensor in the electronic device you're using, and that can get out of whack where the sensor actually shuts down the recharging. So it's trying to avoid overcharging the battery, right, So the sensor shuts it down,

the battery has not received a full charge. Uh, and it's because the sensor needs to be recalibrated. Usually you have to, you know, reset a phone or other computer device, sometimes completely power it down and power back up and then normally will reset. That's usually one of the basic things that happens with electronics. That's also an issue. So sometimes it's not just the battery. Sometimes it's the electron

device itself. And then we have overcharging, which I've already mentioned this idea that you have poured too much energy into the battery in some way or another and that ends up damaging the battery, sometimes catastrophically. More often than not, you've just reduced the useful life of the battery. Uh. Then there's charging cycles. This is kind of similar to

the memory effect. It's it's really the number of times you can fully drain and fully recharge a battery and still like and expect it to give you useful operating life. So you usually get this in the number of thousands. Like again, that's that's the degradation of the chemicals over a period of time, right. Yeah, so even even rechargeable

batteries are not going to stay absolutely perfect forever. They're They're going to degrade, some more slowly than others, and eventually you will need to replace them, which is why you get people who like, um, not to pick on a particular company, but people who talk about Apple products saying that, you know, they make the batteries inaccessible. There's

no way to get in there and change the battery. Now, for most of us, we're probably going to upgrade our phones more frequently than it would require you to worry about the battery. Yeah, so it's you know, especially when it comes to Apple, which wants you to re re upgrade your phones twice as frequently as anybody else does. Although I'm an Android user and a new Android phone comes out every week, so I get phone in v

all the time. So yeah, that's that's another issue. Then. Um, you know, it's just again, we don't have a magic a magic switch to make battery technology catch up to other types of tech that we rely upon in our electronics. So this is one of those conversations that's on going about, Hey, my my computer can do all this amazing stuff, why have it batteries uh kept pace right right? Well, one of the reasons is, as we talked about before, you can't just keep scaling down. It's not a direct line

of descent. It's not like you're just doing what you did before, but acting a little bit more power into it. You have to explore new areas of chemical configuration. And there is one big one that people have talked about, especially in the area of energy density, and that's lithium air batteries. Yeah. Now this is some crazy energy density. We're actually talking about approaching the energy density of something

like gasoline. Yeah, lithium air based batteries have the potential to offer way way more energy density than standard lithium ion batteries. In fact, I've seen claims that they could reach up to say eleven thousand watt hours per kilogram. Now, remember the watt hours per kilogram of gasoline. We're just like twelve or thirteen thousands, so that's really close. And then when you coupled that with the fact that electrical motors are actually much more efficient, as we said, than

internal combustion engines. You've actually got a more efficient total system there, and that's really cool. Okay, so how does it work? I got this. So we're talking about the process of oxidation. This is the same process where we see rust forming. I mean, you know, it's the whole oxidizing thing, except in the case of lithium, we're talking about electrons being released as part of this process, and so that is where you've got the anode. And then

it's the same model as old batteries. You're just talking about different chemicals. Yeah, as you still have an anode and you still have a cathode. You still have electrics, electrons being generated and released or at least released really is what. You're not generating them, you're just releasing them into the wild. So the anode side is the oxidation of lithium, and then the cathode side is where you

have a reduction of oxygen and that induces the electron flow. So, um, it's not not the not the easiest thing in the world to do. We've got lots of different groups working on lithium air batteries. But it's not it's difficult to make a stable one. Uh, it's more than difficult. I mean, it's a real problem right now. In fact, I've seen it described as it's not just one research problem, it's multiple research problems at the same time. But yeah, like

we said, people are actually working on it. IBM has a lithium air battery research project. It's called Battery five hundred, and their stated goals are to create a powerful new battery for electric cars that is a as good as gasoline, b gets five hundred miles or eight hundred kilometers range per charge, and see has a total electric drive system comparable in size, weight and price to a gasoline drive train.

Though they admit that quote this is a very high risk, very high reward, long horizon project, so they're saying in their sort of mission statement that's public facing, that this may very well not work. It's just sort of research into something that would be a big score if it does. With the timetable they gave was three years basic science to know what the commercial applications would be before around. So, yeah, this is one of those things that could end paying off.

But it may be that we aren't able to find a practical means of harnessing it. We know it works. The principle is sound. It's just making it practical so that we can actually harness it. That's the problem. Yeah,

they're just all kinds of problems with implementing this. One that I read about is the fact that lithium has an explosive reaction with water when they come in contact, right, Yeah, which is problematic because well, water exists as vapor in the air, and if you're talking about exposing this lithium to the air, that that's a problem. Becomes an external combustion engine. Yeah, so you'd obviously need to find ways around that, and they're just it's really tricky from what

I understand. Well, then you also have another potential lithium solution, lithium silicon batteries. So your lithium ion batteries usually they have graphine as part of the components. Not graphine, Uh is okay, but silicon actually is able to to hold a much larger energy density than the graphine based lithium ion batteries. It's hypothetically like ten times as energy densit. So yeah, you've got you know, if you're talking a hundred fifty hours. Now you're talking, you know, a thousand,

five hundred one hours. That's that's a big leap. But there's another problem, which is that when silicon starts to when when you're charging this battery, the silicon starts to swell to it's normal volume. So designing a battery that can handle that, the fact that you have a component that's going to grow in size by volume, uh, that is an engineering problem too, although there is research that

is looking at making this possible. Um A team from Stanford has been working on a pomegranate inspired design wherein nanoparticles of silken are encased in carbon capsules and then kind of clustered together like seeds in tougher carbon rhymes.

And this helps a protect that that's super expansive and and also very brittle silicon from from bursting out of the battery or falling apart during charging, and be minimizes its contact with the electrolyte, which helps prevent build up of this like reaction gunk on the anode that will

degrade the battery's performance pretty quickly. Right right, Yeah, it's kind of think about it as uh, some folks get stuck in the doorway, and you can't have as many electrons passed through the path because you've got this build up, all right, So we got we got pomegrads, so we got our fruit based batteries, as I understand it, because I was totally listening just then, though not the only batteries from the produce section, as you will soon learn. But no, no, Lauren, I know that you also have

something in here about liquid based batteries. Are you telling me we're like, we're going going back in time, because I'm thinking like the ancient batteries here, the heady yeah, or even voltaic piles and things like that. I kind of like that, except a lot more efficient and less dangerous. UM. These are sometimes called flow batteries, and the idea here is that you've got two chemical storage tanks hooked up to an electrochemical conversion hardware p thing UM and it's

a technical thing, is the very technical term. So the fluids are pumped through and then the amount of energy that can be stored is really only limited by the capacity of your tanks. UM. This tech is really being looked at for for solar and wind energy kind of applications in order to to make them cheaper. You know, solid batteries are so expensive and so heavy, and you need a lot of them to effectively store the energy that's created through these these greener methods, and this, this

could kind of solve that. Traditionally, the um electrolytes in flow batteries have been expensive metals like vanadium. I don't even know how to say that. I didn't look at Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what Captain America's shields made out of. That's vibranium wat brain stuff. I'm looking this up because I don't believe it's real. No, it's real. You're right,

it's unobtainium. Now, these things are in use right now and in like Japan and China to help manage the power grids, so they are in fact effective, but at the price of some seven d dollars per kill a lot hour of storage capacity, like on the average, it can go way up from there. Um. According to the U. S Department of Energy, they need to hit more like a hundred dollars per kill a lot hour to make

wind farms really economical. Now, all right, so you talked about pomegranates, and now on the next note on our list, here I see rue barb. What a potato battery. It's not really ruebar but it's just similar to a molecule found in rubarb. It's almost identical to a molecule that occurs naturally in ruebarb. This is research out of Harvard. They they've been making a carbon based molecule called quine on. Yes,

I'm gonna say quine on um. It's found in green plants and crude oil and can be pretty cheaply, uh, turned into this thing that you can use. UM that the molecules in this case are housed in water, which makes the batteries pretty non flammable, which is excellent all around. UM. It's it's performing as well as the vanadium so far and isn't degrading after repeated cycles. UM, although it needs

a whole lot more testing. I mean they've they've got like a hundred cycles under their belt, and they would need thousands and thousands too. So the vanadium, the big problem there was that they're really expensive. You're talking about seven per kill a one hour or something like that. How do how does this approach measure up compared to that? According to the Harvard team, that could reduce storage costs to dollars per kill a lot hour. How does that

compare to a potato battery. I don't know. Well, we'll get right favorably. What is what is the price per pound of rhubarb versus potatoes? Rubarb is fairly expensive, but I think they can grow it in many home gardens. We're looking at a molecule here that we can synthesize. Okay, we have the technology. What about the problem of disposing of batteries because batteries, like we've been talking about, tend to have things in them that you just don't want to get in to say, your water supply or in

your body. Yeah, and there are certain things like there are people who who their lives depend upon medical devices that are implanted inside their bodies that require some form of power, usually provided by a battery. So what solutions are we looking at? Their researchers are indeed working on it.

There's a team out of Carnegie Melon that's created a a sodium ion battery using the melanin from cuttlefish inc. For the anode and magnese oxide is the cathode that the whole thing breaks down into non toxic materials in the body. So you know, like like imagine being able to to swallow a smart pill that can release drugs after it's cleared the stomach. The stomach, of course, will destroy a lot of medications. That's why, for example, UM patients who have arthritis have to go into a doctor's

office for injections. And then this way you could actually get more of the effective ingredient in that medication to enter your system. You wouldn't lose so much of it through you know, just going through your stomach, which also means that you could have a much more controlled dosage, which also means that you have reduced side effect if there are any. So yeah, there are a lot of reasons why this would be a huge benefit to medicine,

right or you know, okay, forget about wearable technology. What if you had swallowable fitness deck. Okay, so yeah, like what if what if I could put something inside me that can completely monitor everything from caloric burn to caloric intake. Like there are devices out there right now that say they can, uh, they can measure your caloric intake, but really, the technology right now for us to be able to measure that noninvasively exists, but exists in like big old

macro bulk format. It's usually a machine where you you connect a device that's using light to go through your your veins and say your ear lobe or your fingertips. So that's not something that you can easily wear, but this could actually change that, yeah, or something that dispenses emergency medication. Like for example, if if your doctor knows that you are prone to epileptic seizures, you could have something it that could be triggered by that seizure to

control it for you right away. Um or hey, outside the human body, these things could be useful as well, like like if you have an oil spill or another disaster, the whole army of these things could be dropped into the site and they would biodegrade into something that isn't harmful, isn't causing more harm right right, So it's not it's not further damaging the environment, and yet it's letting you keep an eye on what the conditions are that that

definitely does have its use sure, And and this isn't the only that this Carnegie melon cuttlefish batteries is not the only one in development. All of the ones that I created are food based, aren't they wrote about it. This car's got forty cuttlefish power. I absolutely want that measurement. Cuttle Fish are not for eating, there for cuddling. That's very true. Then you don't eat cuttle fish. They're very nice. Um,

I get really upset about cuttlefish. Okay, But so there's a team from the University of Illinois that is using a magnesium foil, anodes and cathodes made of stuff like iron, a, tungsten, all of which are non toxic in low concentrations UM

and a staline electrolyte, and biodegradable packaging. They're they're estimating that that with this particular configuration, realistically, with with further research and improvements, could could create a quarter centimeter square by one micrometer thick battery that could power a wireless implant for an entire day. Wow, that's pretty incredible stuff. That's that's thinner than a sheet of paper. It's tiny.

Have you heard Have you heard about the Robust Affordable Next Generation Energy Storage Systems a k A. Robust Affordable Next Generation Energy Storage Systems program also known as RANGE. Yeah, thank you for repeating exactly what I said. Adding program

at the bottom of it. Yeah. I read an interview with r PASE Deputy Director Dr Cheryl Martin from last year and she mentioned some cool battery innovation ideas that are going on under the Range program, and that's having to do with vehicles mostly um So, she talks about the idea of like doubling the role of a battery in an electric car, so it's not just a battery, it's not just providing energy, but it also plays some other important function within the structure of the car that

helps you cut down on the total weight of the car. Say, for example, it absorbs impact and crashes. She actually talked about that there was a project led by oak Ridge National Laboratory where they're creating an impact resistant electro light. So when the battery gets hit with a strong force, like if you're in a car crash, the liquid electro light suddenly thickens up and it absorbs the energy from

the impact. You know. I've also heard interesting ideas of incorporating new battery uh structures, so it's using using the same chemicals essentially as as sort of the stuff you're talking about here, but actually incorporating it so it ends up like molded to the frame of the vehicle itself. Yeah, like new solid state batteries to sort of fit the natural structure of the car instead of just being this big heavy brick sitting in part of the car. That's

pretty cool. Or on a much smaller scale, if you use our good friend now technology in order to uh create materials that have a a larger surface area, then you can you can improve some of the efficiency of

some of this stuff. Yeah, and again a lot of the improvements and batteries aren't from the batteries themselves, Like, it's figuring out how to make more efficient electronics that make better use of the power, so that if we do get to a point where we have a real battery breakthrough, like some of the ones that are potentially could happen based on the ones we've we've just been talking about, we're really sitting pretty then, But what about

electronics that don't need batteries at all? So are we going what back to plugging it into the wall as I was, you're talking about No, we're talking about wireless electronics, talking about like Tesla podcast towers. No, no, no, we're not talking about say, inductive coupling or any of these things we've talked about before, where it is possible to say, charge a device without necessarily touching it. Sure, sure an induction I mean, for examples of those medical applications that

we were talking about. A moment ago is really great for stuff that could be implanted near the skin, But if you needed to swallow it or put it behind a bone or something like that, that would make it really difficult to use. Right, So that's not what we're talking about. Instead, we're talking about very small devices that

work on what's called ambient back scatter. So last year, researchers at the University of Washington announced they had created a group of small communication devices that did not require batteries, but they were able to transmix signals based on ambient back scatter from the transmissions that are going on all around us. So you've got TV towers broadcasting signals and

your wireless router broadcasting signals. Basically, they designed them in such a way to reflect ambient train mission signals for their own purposes, to sort of create a Morse code of automatic reflection without having local power, so they can these little devices can communicate with devices around them. Now, this probably can't be translated into any big power hungry device like a laptop or a smartphone. But it might

be really useful for small sensors and communication tags. That would be really important if we were ever going to create, saying,

the Internet of things in our home. Now, this really reminds me of, uh, you know if I don't know if you guys ever built your own radio, but the old crystal radio kits, there are some where you could just you build a little crystal radio and you didn't have a battery, You had no power source whatsoever, except you use the antenna and the antenna would pick up radio waves and that would generate just enough power to

operate the radio itself. It doesn't need another source. This sounds to me like engineers have figured out a similar way based on that same principle to make actual use of that. Because the little radio transmitter you could make where it doesn't need external power, it required an incredibly long antenna to work properly. Like it was not something

that was practical. It was more of a here's how you can learn about electronics and radios, but not like this is going to be something that you're not going to be jamming in your in your dorm room listening to Pink Floyd on this The models that I saw were less than palm size, a few inches across. Yeah,

that's pretty cool. Yeah. One of the really cool things about it that I saw on the video demonstrating this idea was that it could make in a way ideas along these lines, could make a technology I've been wanting for so long, which is the control f function for the real world. So like when you have lost your keys despite having had them in your hands no less than five minutes ago. Right, Yeah, So the idea they showed was that say you've got your key is or

maybe your couch stamped with these communication devices. They don't need to have power batteries or anything. They can just reflect signals that are ambilently going through your home to send a signal to your phone that says your keys are on the couch, right, Like your couch would text your phone and be like, hey dude, you left your keys here. Wow, And that's a great I mean, that would save me so much time and sanity. I would love that. Well, you know, this has been a fun conversation.

We we definitely acknowledge the fact that batteries have been kind of a a stumbling block for a lot of the technology we that could be all around us right now if it weren't for the fact that it's pretty power hungry and we don't have the power to supply to them. But I think also people should remember to be grateful for how amazing batteries are today. You don't even think about it. You've got a cell phone that you can carry around with you without plugging in and

it will work for hours. Our batteries today. So yeah, we were got to wrap this up. But thank you for coming along with us on our journey down Electric Avenue, which actually isn't Atlanta by the way, There is an Electric Avenue in Atlanta I've been down at. But anyway,

thanks so much for coming along with us. We uh, we're really excited about these kind of topics, you know, the challenging things in the future that that seemed to be pretty simple on the surface, but as you start to dig down you realize, oh, so these are these are real you know, science and engineering issues that lots of smart people are working very hard on to try and get the next development so that we're not held back by some fundamental issue from our potential. So if

you guys have any potential electricity joke. If you guys have any suggestions for future topics of forward thinking, you should let us know. Send us an email right just as FW thinking at discovery dot com, or drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus. Our handle at all three is f W Thinking and we will pop to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places,