> Although the researchers acknowledge that more work is required before the material could be used in batteries that are comparable to what is in use today, the team probed the conductivity of the new material and found its potential as an effective battery electrolyte to be particularly promising.
Somebody should have a site which shows 1, 2, 5, and 10 years ago in battery technology announcements. There's at least one major battery breakthrough claim each month. These guys should shut up until they can at least light up an LED in the lab.
Could be worse. Remember uBeam, the ultrasonic power people? They're now called "Sonic Energy".[1] Still doesn't really work.
The engineers should absolutely not shut up until they've reached some arbitrary point you care about. They seem to have done good work, have published and written / worked with Lois to write an explanation more easily understandable to a lay audience which explains the background and what they've done followed by the current limitations.
Used to be we had TV shows, magazines and the evening news that talked about The Future, and mostly stuck to tech that was at or near the pre-production phase.
Those all kinda dried up and what most of us have available in its stead is these 'breaking news' things where every bench-top experiment that got a research grant approved gets written up.
This is not even remotely the same thing. Articles like this aren't talking about the near future. It's not even science fiction. It's fiction fiction. Maybe even fantasy. And I have much better authors to chose from if that's what I'm after.
The scientific method demands replication, and we've talked an awful lot about papers being published that can't be reproduced.
When it has been replicated it's theoretical science. But it's still a variant on the XKCD joke about how everything (including guns) kills cancer in vitro but that doesn't mean you can use it to cure cancer.
Lab-only experiment might clue the next person into a phenomenon that can make it out of the lab. But making it news when it hits the scientific journals has been a sore subject for a lot of people, and seems like it always will be, and that it might even get worse before it gets better. We call a lot of things 'science' that haven't followed the scientific method, and it's exasperating.
This is not the first time materials sciences people at UIUC have looked at self-healing materials. Twenty+ years ago they were looking at lacing concrete to repair small cracks. Really cool stuff... that has not made it out of the lab as far as I'm aware.
Batteries today are better than batteries 1, 2, 5 and 10 years ago. Lab results may not translate 1:1 into commercial applications, but they still provide the starting points for real improvements.
For comparison, Duke Nukem 3D came out 23 years ago. So the interim was 2 years, 3 years, 15 years. I expect Duke Nukem 5 to be released in 2091 as the 100th anniversary version.
> Lithium-ion batteries are notorious for developing internal electrical shorts that can ignite a battery’s liquid electrolytes, leading to explosions and fires.
That seems a little like scaremongering to me bearing in mind the number of batteries that are now deployed.
The use of the word notorious seems a bit over the top.
> Although the researchers acknowledge that more work is required before the material could be used in batteries that are comparable to what is in use today, the team probed the conductivity of the new material and found its potential as an effective battery electrolyte to be particularly promising.