If you have almost any modern tech devices – a laptop, a smartphone, a tablet, a smartwatch – you’ll probably have to spend a little time today charging some or all of them.
Rechargeable batteries typically last a few years, but a new project out of Australia could lead to batteries that last nearly a decade.
And that’s thanks in part to sound waves.
The team at Victoria’s RMIT University is working on batteries made with nanomaterials they call MXene.
It conducts electricity really well, which would make it useful alternative to the lithium-based batteries often used today.
But it’s prone to rusting when it’s in a humid environment.
The researchers could have applied an anti-rust coating, but that would have made the MXene less effective.
So they found a different way to keep the rust at bay: send some sound waves through the MXene film.
By holding rust back, they say the MXene-based batteries could last up to nine years.
And that’s good news when e-waste is a growing concern.
Huge numbers of batteries that can be recycled aren’t.
And it’s not good when high tech batteries ends up in landfills.
Making batteries that last two or three times longer than the current ones keeps batteries out of landfills.
Which you’d probably have to say amounts to some good vibrations.
February is Black History Month, and few people spent as much time collecting artifacts from Black history than Elizabeth Meaders.
The Staten Island schoolteacher spent like 70 years collecting every kind of item imaginable.
Her massive collection included handwritten signs from the 1963 March on Washington, medals earned by Black soldiers in the Civil War and a life-size wax figure of home run king Hank Aaron.
Check out the link below for a great Smithsonian article about her.
Australian tech could triple phone battery life and solve e-waste crisis (The New Daily)
Why a Schoolteacher Spent 70 Years Collecting Thousands of Black History Artifacts (Smithsonian)
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