This new battery charges to 70% in two minutes, and lasts for 20 years

Researchers have developed a groundbreaking new lithium ion battery that charges super quickly and lasts 10 times longer than today’s batteries. It’ll be on the market within two years.

Sick of waiting an hour for your phone to charge before you leave the house? Researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have come up with the best solution yet - a lithium ion battery that charges to 70 percent in just two minutes. 

Even better, it also lasts for 20 years, and will reportedly be available to the public within two years.

Rechargeable lithium ion batteries are already common in our mobile phones, tablets and laptops - but most only last around 500 recharge cycles, which is around two to three years of typical use. And at the moment batteries take around two hours to fully charge.

The new battery drastically improves this process, and will allow you to charge your phone while you look for your keys on the way out the door. It would also help make electric vehicles a more viable alternative to fossil-fuel-powered cars, by reducing battery replacement costs and allowing drivers to recharge their cars in minutes. 

“Electric cars will be able to increase their range dramatically, with just five minutes of charging, which is on par with the time needed to pump petrol for current cars,” said Professor Chen Xiaodong who led the study, in a press release. “Equally important, we can now drastically cut down the toxic waste generated by disposed batteries, since our batteries last 10 times longer than the current generation of lithium-ion batteries.”

The breakthrough came after the scientists replaced the traditional graphite that makes up theanode (the negative pole of the battery) in lithium-ion batteries with a new gel material made from titanium dioxide nanotubes that they created themselves.

These nanotubes are a thousand times thinner than a human hair, and they speed up the rate at which electrons and ions can transfer in and out of the batteries, allowing for super-fast charging. They also allow more energy to be packed into the batteries. This means that the battery can now offer 10,000 charging cycles, instead of the usual 500.

Even better, the new batteries will be relatively cheap, as titanium dioxide is inexpensive and already readily available in soil. The team has published details on how they formed the titanium dioxide gel in Advanced Materials, and have already had the technology licensed to eventually produce the devices. They expect they’ll be on the market within two years.

We literally can’t wait.

Scientists have created the most effective “invisibility cloak” so far, and you can make one for $100

One of the most promising invisibility cloak devices has been unveiled, along with instructions for how to create it at home.

Created by scientists at the University of Rochester in New York, the device can hide large objects from sight using cheap and readily available lenses.

“There’ve been many high tech approaches to cloaking and the basic idea behind these is to take light and have it pass around something as if it isn’t there, often using high-tech or exotic materials,” said John Howell, a professor of physics at the University of Rochester in a press release.

But while it works like an invisibility cloak, it looks more like something your optometrist would use to check your eyes - and when something is placed behind the layered lens, it disappears from view, leaving the background untouched.

“This is the first device that we know of that can do three-dimensional, continuously multidirectional cloaking, which works for transmitting rays in the visible spectrum,” graduate student Joseph Choi, who helped develop the technology with Howell, said in the release.

Previously, scientists had struggled to hide objects from varying angles, so they would be masked when you looked at them from straight on, but would be visible again when you moved your head. Now this new device has been used to cloak a hand, a face and a ruler from all angles. And the applications are pretty incredible - for example, a doctor could look through the lens and see the organs he was operating on below his hand. They could also let drivers see through their vehicle to their blind spot. Not to mention the fact that it can make you invisible, which is just freaking awesome.

The device can also be scaled up depending on the size of the lens, and would allow large objects to be cloaked. It also works for the whole visible spectrum of light, which means there are no limitations to what it can block.

It works by using four separate lenses with different focal lengths. By carefully calculating the distance between these lenses, Choi and Howell managed to bend the light around an object. They've submitted their results to the journal Optics Express, and the paper is also available on arXiv.org.

The team has now released instructions and equations that will help people build a similar device at home for around $100.

1. Purchase two sets of two lenses with different focal lengths f1 and f2 (four lenses total, two with f1 focal length, and two with f2 focal length)

2. Separate the first two lenses by the sum of their focal lengths (So f1 lens is the first lens, f2 is the second lens, and they are separated by t1= f1+ f2).

3. Do the same in Step 2 for the other two lenses.

4. Separate the two sets by t2=2 f2 (f1+ f2) / (f1— f2) apart, so that the two f2 lenses are t2 apart.

They also note that achromatic lenses provide the best image quality. And fresnel lenses can be used to reduce the total length (2t1+t2). Smaller total length should reduce edge effects and increase the range of angles.

Well, we know what we’re going to be trying to make at home this weekend.

Check it out in action in the video below: