Battery technology has lagged behind in terms of advancement.  There are two main hindrances with batteries…storage capacity and wear.  We have found some interesting alternatives to batteries, but the old double a  is going to be hard to replace in form, and until there are some real breakthroughs we might have to hold on to our dreams of phones and laptops with super fast processors.  However, before you wake up, a company has come through with an innovation in the wear category. read more »

We have seen green technology come to mobile phones before in the form of the Samsung Spring Reclaim, and we have also seen green tech influence the end of the life cycle of the phone by being able to recycle it easier with the ecoATM.  However, Designer Daizi Zheng thinks that the production of the batteries ” is expensive, consuming valuable resources on manufacturing, presenting a disposal problem and harmful to the environment.”

She was looking to catch the problem on the front end, and she might be on to something.  Zheng designed a phone for Nokia that would run on Coke.  Running a fuel cell on sugar water is nothing new, but the tandem of Coke and Nokia could make a big splash. read more »

(A) Heating one side of a conductive rod causes heated electrons to move to the other end, creating a voltage. (B) Heating one side of a magnetized nickel-iron rod creates a “spin voltage,” with spin-up and spin-down electrons on opposite ends. Image credit: (c)2008 Nature.

Eiji Saitoh a physicist at Keio University in Yokohama, Japan, and his colleagues have published their results in a recent issue of Nature. As they explain, the term “spin Seebeck effect” comes from the original Seebeck effect, which is a thermoelectric phenomenon discovered by Thomas Johann Seebeck in the 1800s. The Seebeck effect states that, heating one side of a conducting rod causes electrons at that end to heat up and move toward the cooler side, creating a voltage. read more »