Your Blogscientist has been falling down on the job. A few days ago I saw plenty of headlines about new nanoscale batteries. Everything’s nano-whatnot these days. I figured I’d read about it later. No doubt somebody had an extra 5% improved energy yield or something.
Turns out, no, this is really new. A team at MIT [1] has genetically engineered bacteriophages — a kind of virus that normally attacks bacteria — to assemble batteries. Put them in a soup with the right ingredients and they pull out what they need to assemble anodes, cathodes, and, in short, batteries. (Abstract of Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences article [2].)
It’s lab bench work at this point, but as Belcher says [3],
“[R]ight now the thing is trying to make the best material possible, and if we get a really great material, then we have to think about how do you scale it.”
Scaling up means laptop batteries, car batteries, and — shoot for the stars, any damn fool can hit the ground — electromagnetic rail gun spaceship launching batteries.
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