• GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    This is an ignorant opinion. My first cell phone (about 30 years ago) had a battery pack about as big as my current cell phone, and had a capacity of 500 mAh. My current phone has a bigger screen, the rest of the phone, and a 4000 mAh battery. How do you suppose that happened if none of those new battery technologies ever panned out?

    • algorithmae@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      Of course battery technology improved, but the amount of news articles claiming XYZ will change technology forever outnumbers the actual number of innovations 100 to 1

      • Sonori@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Your standerd science article is written by someone with a half remembered high school science education rephrasing another person with the same background who has on rare occasion actually talked to the people who wrote the study. Both of these people don’t understand what’s actually happened but need to make it sound like it’s as big a deal as possible to get clicks.

        We’ve found a incremental improvement in sodium ion that may do something becomes sodium ion is going to take over the world in very short order.

        • averyminya@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          It’s about scalability and all the options on the table. We’ve got self-recharging diamond batteries that contain plutonium from refined nuclear waste estimated to last a minimum of 20,000 years. Theoretically this could entirely replace batteries needed for pacemakers and any small cell battery. There could be ways to scale it up even further, we’ll just have to figure out a way how.

          That’s just as promising as sodium power because it gives us another opportunity. It’s a way to reduce waste (nuclear waste is tricky to get rid of). It’s just about ability to deliver. Diamond batteries have been in production and were supposed to be available this year - chances are slim that will still be the case though lol.

    • mkhoury@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I agree that the technologies did pan out, but I don’t think it’s an ignorant opinion.

      I also feel blasé about the new battery articles because they tend to promise orders of magnitude changes rather than incremental change. Batteries did get much better, but it doesn’t really feel that way I suppose. Our experience of battery power hasn’t changed much.

      It’s really about getting excited about the article or the tech, it takes so long to see its mild effects that there’s no real cashing out on the excitement, so it’s not very satisfying.