by Anton Shilov 03/11/2009 | 11:56 PM Engineers from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a kind
of beltway that allows for the rapid transit of electrical
energy through a well-known battery material, an advance that
could usher in smaller, lighter batteries – for cell phones and
other devices – that could recharge in seconds rather than
hours. State-of-the-art lithium rechargeable batteries have very
high energy densities – they are good at storing large amounts
of charge. The tradeoff is that they have relatively slow power
rates – they are sluggish at gaining and discharging that
energy. Consider current batteries for electric cars. “They have
a lot of energy, so you can drive at 55 mph for a long time, but
the power is low. You can't accelerate quickly,” said Gerbrand
Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and
Engineering. Traditionally, scientists have thought that the
lithium ions responsible, along with electrons, for carrying
charge across the battery simply