Stanford University researchers have made a discovery that could signal the arrival of laptop batteries that last more than a day on a single charge.

The researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to give rechargeable lithium ion batteries--used in laptops, iPods, video cameras, and mobile phones--as much as 10 times more charge. This potentially could give a conventional battery-powered laptop 40 hours of battery life, rather than 4 hours.

The new batteries were developed by assistant professor Yi Cui and colleagues at Stanford University's Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

"It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development."

CNET.com

Wow, if this technology works out it could mean having a quick charge and 400 mile range for electric cars. I just wonder how cold weather would affect the performance. An improvement by an order of magnitude is impressive to say the least.

Gee, but that is impressive. Let's hope the technology is not too expensive and can be applied to larger charge and larger capacity batteries

The original release of the news was sometime in December or November I think, though I don't know if they were sure of the technology yet. It does seem impressive though. Hopefully it will work without being dangerous and cause more exploding batteries.

Yeah thats true, don't want to compromise safety like that
Hopefully it will pan out though, definitely would be nice

With greater power per cell, you could get away with fewer cells. I wonder if that will help with the issue of batteries blowing up.

weazzle wrote:

With greater power per cell, you could get away with fewer cells. I wonder if that will help with the issue of batteries blowing up.

Seriously, only a few incidents out of the millions of batteries out there, I don't think it's a concern IMO. Look at Ford's Pinto and their exploding gastanks from rear enders where people died or got seriously hurt from burns and not much was done for years!

weazzle wrote:

With greater power per cell, you could get away with fewer cells. I wonder if that will help with the issue of batteries blowing up.

I don't think that it's an issue with the number of cells in the battery that caused the problem and more that they were overloaded with Lithium that caused them to exploded as batteries of all sizes were replaced under the replacement programs I saw, not just batteries of a certain size.