The Power of the Press

From the Associated Press...

It's a battery that looks like a piece of paper and can be bent or twisted, trimmed with scissors or molded into any shape needed. While the battery is only a prototype a few inches square right now, the researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who developed it have high hopes for it in electronics and other fields that need smaller, lighter power sources.

"We would like to scale this up to the point where you can imagine printing batteries like a newspaper. That would be the ultimate," Robert Linhardt a professor at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at RPI said in a telephone interview....

The battery uses paper infused with an electrolyte and carbon nanotubes that are embedded in the paper. The carbon nanotubes form the electrodes, the paper is the separator and the electrolyte allows the current to flow.

We use our digital camera a lot, but it's very old, so we've been wondering about when we'd need to get another one, especially on our limited budget. Linda and I both recently upgraded our phones (free with a new contract) and the new phones have cameras far better than our digital camera. But the storage capacity is limited. So I got an mini SD to go in mine, for $30.

The mini SD is really amazing. It's about the size of the fingernail on my little finger and the thickness of a credit card, but holds 1 Gig of data. If they ever developed a flexible hard drive (which I bet they're not far from doing) coupled with a flexible battery and a flexible LCD, we could have a "laptop", that could be rolled up and stored in a thin tube, or simply in an actual notebook.

Printing batteries does give new meaning the the phrase, "The Power of the Press".

Posted by Danny Carlton at August 14, 2007 7:44 AM