He hoisted himself up a 500 meter-cliff at Grand Canyon, did his magic on the Le Mans 24 circuit in France, and traveled 500KM from Tokyo to Kyoto last year And now, he completed the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii, too.

We covered Panasonic’s plan to let its EVOLTA battery-powered mini robot start at the 230km race back in September, and now the company announced the little guy finished it on October 30.

According to Panasonic, it took the robot (in three different configurations) a total of 166 hours and 56 minutes to swim 3.8km, bike 180.2km and then run 42.2km – powered by three rechargeable EVOLTA batteries.

A Japanese accessory maker called Century started selling the “monolith” [JP] today, a case for the iPhone 4, a 1,900mAh battery, and a mini projector rolled into one (it’s still unclear if the device works with the iPhone 4S as well). The monolith is sized at 63.5×126.6×22mm and weighs 97g.

Century says that users can expect images sized at up to 60cm (in 16:9 format), in 640×360 resolution, with a 1,000:1 contrast ratio, and with 12 lumens brightness.

According to the company, the battery provides enough juice for 3 hours of projector usage and takes about 4 hours to fully charge. Without the projector, the in-case battery can add 50% to the life of the iPhone battery.

The monolith is available in black and white (price in Japan: US$260).

Auto maker General Motors and LG Group will be working together to design and engineer electric vehicles thanks to a new partnership that expands on LG’s earlier work for GM in lithium-ion batteries.  Previously, LG delivered batteries for the Chevrolet Volt, the Opel Ampera, and later for a demo fleet of Chevrolet Cruze electric vehicles.

According to the companies, their goal is to reduce both the cost and the time it takes to build electric cars.

LG will cover half the cost for the new EVs and will work alongside engineers from GM to collaborate on components, vehicle structures and architectures. LG will also become GM’s supplier for the components, which it’s permitted to sell to other auto makers. That means this partnership will be good for the electric vehicle industry as a whole, and not just GM.

The deal comes at a time when U.S. automakers are under pressure to raise the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards, per a recent agreement. By the end of 2025, they must meet a CAFE of 54.5 mpg (23.2 km/l) – a goal that will involve improvements to internal combustion and diesel engines, for the most part. But GM says that electric vehicles are expected to play “a major role” in reaching the CAFE goal, too.

There was no timeframe given for the vehicles’ launch.

Sony Japan announced [JP] the ESSP-2000, a storage battery for professional use that serves as a backup power supply unit in the case of emergencies and blackouts. The lithium ion battery stores 2.4kwh, can be charged to 95% in about 2 hours (using conventional power plugs), and it boasts an impressive life span of over 10 years, according to Sony.

The ESSP-2000 has six AC100V power outlets, is sized at 490x610x750mm and weighs 90kg. Sony says that in the case of an outage, it can, for example, power ten 100W desktop PCs for about 2.4 hours.

The company plans to start rolling out the battery in Japan next month (price: $26,000). Sony expects to sell 300 units in the current fiscal year but hasn’t said anything yet regarding international sales plans.

There is probably no one left doubting that electric vehicles will be a huge market in the future, and now it seems that Sony is agreeing, too. The company yesterday announced it will start making lithium-ion batteries specifically for electric cars and hybrids “from the middle of this decade”.

A Sony VP said his company expects demand for such batteries to grow drastically in the years to come, adding big S is ready to build dedicated plants in Japan and elsewhere if necessary. Details are scarce at this point, but a first battery prototype for electric vehicles that was shown to the press yesterday measures 257 x 182mm and apparently boasts a long life.

According to reports in various Japanese newspapers from today, Sony has already started offering its batteries to major electric car makers in Japan and elsewhere.

The picture above shows the Tesla, which is using Panasonic batteries (Panasonic is also an investor).

Via Mainichi Shimbun [JP]

NEC is ready to use some of the expertise it gained by developing lithium-ion batteries for Nissan’s electric vehicles in recent years for home use: according to a report in Japanese business daily The Nikkei that was published today, that new 6kwh household power storage system will only cost around $12,300 – which is about 50% cheaper than comparable systems on sale today.

The purchase price translates to roughly $2,000 per kilowatt-hour, with NEC saying they were able to push down the prices through using components already built on scale in their car battery business.

6kwh is said to be about a third of the average power use a four-person family has in the Tokyo area on a daily basis. The system is designed to be used outdoors and can reduce power consumption of such a family by half by storing electricity at night, according to NEC.

The company will start selling a total of 100 systems as early as this month to monitor usage before the main roll out next year.

The book explores lithium from its earliest beginnings to its use in almost everything that we use today. Fletcher, a writer for Popular Science has done his research and although the topic sounds as dull as lithium-infused brine he keeps the book well-paced and interesting throughout.

Unlike many single-topic non-fiction books (Salt,Cod,Adult Diapers), Fletcher tells us the history of a modern chemical that turned the lowly battery into a real powerhouse. Where will lithium take us next? Fletcher explores the future of lithium-air batteries in this excerpted chapter.

In the quest to rid our cars of oil and our grid of coal and gas, battery scientists have at least two essential duties. The first is to continue to grind through the periodic table in search of the incremental advances that will steadily make the technology a little better every year. The second is to chase ideas that may be decades from commercial reality, because while everyone else is arguing about state tax credits for pack assembly plants and the price of separator material, somebody has to.

Chief among these far-horizon ideas is the highest-risk, highest-reward battery technology of all: lithium-air. At the moment, lithium-air appears to be the best chance battery scientists have to beat gasoline. It is elegant in concept and, theoretically at least, extravagantly energetic.

For the sake of comparison, consider that a lead-acid battery can store something like 40 watt-hours of energy per kilogram. Today’s best lithium-ion batteries can hold about 200 watt-hours per kilogram, and lithium-ion has a theoretical maximum of 400 watt-hours per kilogram. Lithium-air has a theoretical maximum of 11,000 watt-hours per kilogram. Even after handicapping to take into account weight, efficiency, and other foreseeable technological obstacles—after assuming that, for the sake of argument, the lithium-air battery will be able to deliver only 15 or 20 percent of its theoretical energy capacity—it still approaches what gasoline, because of the poor efficiency of the internal combustion engine, can deliver. And that is why scientists have been dreaming about it for decades. “As with all things in life where there’s a big prize, it’s not an easy one to reach,” Peter Bruce said.

Lithium-air is probably the purest and earthiest battery chemistry possible, because in its simplest formulation it involves nothing but lithium, oxygen, and carbon—the lightest metal in the universe and two essential elements of all living beings. “You take the positive electrode of a lithium-ion battery and you replace it with porous carbon,” explained Bruce, who today is one of the world’s leading lithium-air researchers. “The electrolyte”—this could either be an organic solvent as in today’s lithium-ion batteries, a combination of polymers, or maybe even something based on water—“floods the pores of the carbon. Oxygen comes in from the air.” And then the lithium ions, the oxygen, and the electrons routing around through the external circuit all combine to form lithium peroxide (Li2O2), a solid. Then, as with any rechargeable battery, the whole thing happens in reverse. “When you charge up the battery, you actually decompose this solid material. It goes back to lithium ions and electrons and pumps oxygen into the atmosphere again.”

Mainly because of the signal it sends to the world—IBM is interested!—the highest-profile lithium-air project right now is probably Battery 500, a lab dedicated strictly to lithium-air research at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. “A practical electric car will need a lot more mileage than is possible with lithium-ion batteries,” said Winfried Wilcke, head of the project. “Five hundred miles is the target you really want.” That, along with a nice resonance with the Daytona 500, is why IBM decided to call its lithium-air project Battery 500—“to differentiate this from incremental improvements of lithium ion.”

IBM is taking a supercomputer-driven, fundamental-physics approach to the problem. “Electrochemistry has had a long history of a very Edisonian approach,” Wilcke said. “But for something as risky and difficult as a lithium-air project, that’s not good enough.” It’s risky and difficult because “wherever you look there are challenges,” he said. “It’s like climbing Mount Everest.”

First there’s the maddening difficulty of recharging. Getting the discharge reaction to happen once, to get the lithium to react with oxygen to form solid lithium peroxide—thanks to recent advances, that part is not a problem. What is a problem is getting that reaction to happen in reverse, to get the solid lithium peroxide to decompose into oxygen and then plate pure lithium back on the negative electrode with mirror-like smoothness. Power is another problem. The reaction between oxygen and lithium is intrinsically slow, far too sluggish to blast a car up the highway in a passing maneuver.

Hope for the power problem comes in the form of nanotechnology, which, as it does for many other lithium-based battery technologies, increases the surface area of the individual electrode particles, thereby increasing the rate at which the battery can charge and discharge. (Catalysts can also help that reaction happen more quickly.)

As with anything involving highly reactive metallic lithium, safety is a concern. (Today’s lithium-ion batteries contain no elemental lithium, which is so reactive that it doesn’t appear in nature in its pure form.) Still, Wilcke argues that we should first find out whether lithium-air batteries are even remotely feasible before worrying about safety issues. Dalhousie University professor Jeff Dahn, who experienced firsthand the hazards of batteries using lithium metal early in his career, is more cautious. “What Moli Energy found back in the late 1980s was that lithium-metal electrodes, just under normal use, led to cell failures that were at just too high an incidence rate to make it a viable business,” he said.

*

As chief technology officer of the Berkeley-based company PolyPlus, Steve Visco is in charge of making lithium metal safe and usable. PolyPlus was spun out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1990. “In many ways it operated as a kind of innovation center for batteries,” Visco said. He told me that the company did “all of the groundbreaking work in lithium-sulfur chemistry,” another promising high-energy battery candidate. As they were studying lithium-sulfur batteries, they found that they couldn’t find a way to stop the sulfur from interacting, undesirably, with the lithium. “There was only one real way we could see to stop that, and that would be to somehow encapsulate the lithium with a conductive solid electrolyte, like a thin glass layer.”

After doing some basic research, they started looking for an existing material they could use for that protective layer. They were lucky. A company in Japan called Ohara was making exactly what they needed. “I called them and had them ship us some plates, and when I talked to their representative, he said, ‘Well, I have some of these plates, but they’ve been sitting on my desk for a couple years.’ ” One of the major challenges with fabricating a material like this is making it stable enough to sit on a desktop without reacting with the moisture in the air and corroding. “And I thought, ‘Wow, if they’re that stable, that they can sit on his desk for two years without turning into a puddle, I want to look at those.’ So I said,
‘Send me the samples that have been sitting on your desk for two years.’ He did, and we immediately put lithium up against those plates after actually verifying it was conductive, and it degraded. So we said, ‘Okay, that’s why nobody’s using it— it’s not stable against lithium.’ ”

Fortuitously, PolyPlus had already developed a process for coating lithium with multiple layers of different materials that were designed to make otherwise unstable combinations of materials—combinations that normally react and corrode or melt or catch fire—stable. “Instead of lithium touching that white ceramic piece, we put something between the two that allowed lithium to move between the two but where nothing would react. We tried that and what we saw was, ‘Wow, this looks really stable.’ And then at that moment one of our electrochemists and I started talking and we said, ‘You know, if this stuff is stable in air, we might be able to build a lithium-air battery.’ ”

People had been talking about lithium-air for decades, but no one had ever figured out how to get around the fact that air contains moisture, and moisture attacks lithium. “All these discussions about lithium-air batteries, although interesting, had that basic flaw,” Visco said. “That if you were to build something, it would be a bit of a novelty. You’d never have anything practical.”

To see if they did have something practical, they decided to subject their coated lithium metal to the most direct test possible. “We put water right up against it,” Visco said. “And we said, ‘Either it’s going to get attacked and fall apart, or maybe we’ll see something.’ And it actually shocked us. What we saw was extreme, very stable electrode potential. So then we said, ‘Let’s see if we can move lithium in and out,’ and it just worked like a charm. So we said, ‘Wow, this is a big thing.’ ”

That year, 2003, PolyPlus went into stealth mode, and Visco and his colleagues spent the year writing patents. When they came out of hiding, they began talking about some of the most interesting far-horizon developments the battery world had seen in a long time. Naturally, they applied for funding from DARPA, the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, and got it. They began working on two different lines of research. First was lithium- seawater batteries, which could be used to power oceanographic research vessels or military craft. The second was lithium-air. Within the lithium-air program they began studying both primary (one-use) batteries, which today Visco says are working very well and delivering charge capacities of 800 milliamp-hours per gram, as well as the real prize, rechargeables.

PolyPlus’s lithium-air battery is based on an interesting tweak of traditional lithium-ion design. The negative electrode is made of metallic lithium, and the positive is air. Between the two is a ceramic barrier. “In our battery, things are switched around a bit,” Visco says. “It almost looks like a piece of glass, but it’s white.” But the metallic lithium anode is encased in a series of ceramic barriers that allow it to engage in the right reactions while keeping it completely isolated from moisture. “You can hold it in your hand, you can put it in a glass of water, and it’ll just sit there,” Visco said. “It’s completely stable. And as soon as you hook it up to a wire, it becomes active.”

To show exactly how stable the coated lithium electrode is, Visco’s team built a lithium- water battery in which the water “electrode” is an aquarium inhabited by clown fish. The water in which those fish live acts as the positive electrode for the battery, which is connected to a green 3- volt LED. “In a sense they’re swimming inside a lithium battery, and they’re completely unperturbed.” As always, there are hurdles to clear. Visco’s team has the same problem as all lithium-air researchers, which is recharging—getting solid lithium peroxide to break back down to its constituent parts in an orderly fashion. And they have lithium metal to deal with. The way PolyPlus encapsulates their lithium-metal electrode makes it easy to handle, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy to recharge. “No one has ever really shown [rechargeable lithium metal] to be doable yet,” Visco said. And that, in part, is why it’ll be a long time before PolyPlus’s lithium-air batteries are driving our cars. “Even if we commercialize a lithium-air battery, it’s going to take a long time before you see battery packs that are large enough and proven and tested enough that you would start thinking about transportation,” Visco said.

*

Today, electric cars come with too many caveats. Unless it has a backup gas engine, an electric vehicle will probably be a second car. Only when cities have charging stations in every parking meter and every parking garage will electrics truly be practical. Even then, it might take a nationwide chain of high-power, fast- charging stations or battery-swapping businesses before you can take a road trip in a purely electric car.

There are problems with waiting on the infrastructure, however. Consider fast charging, which would allow electric-car drivers to dump their batteries full of electrons in a matter of minutes, making a recharge only slightly more time- consuming than a visit to the gas station. The math isn’t promising for the prospect of a major network of electron filling stations. “Let’s say you’ve got a battery that holds 25 kilowatt-hours,” said Elton Cairns of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “If you want to charge that in fifteen minutes, then you’ve got to have a 100-kilowatt substation. If you’ve got something like the Tesla, with over 50 kilowatt-hours, and you want to charge that in fifteen minutes, you’re talking 200 kilowatts. Your house takes 1 kilowatt. If you want to have something like a gasoline fuel station that is all electrical, you’re talking about multi-megawatts of power at that station. And I just don’t see that happening.”

There are a couple of ways to react to this sort of discouraging calculus. One is defeatism. The other is research. “Infrastructure gains are the hardest there are,” IBM’s Wilcke said, “which is one reason [hydrogen] fuel cells haven’t worked.” That is exactly why Wilcke is now devoting his career to trying to find out whether the lithium-air battery can be made reality. With a breakthrough battery that can deliver a car five hundred miles on a single charge, only the most speed-addled road tripper would need fast charging or battery swapping. Everyone else will charge curbside at the hotel and then get back on the road the next morning. “I’d rather tackle a really difficult technical problem,” Wilcke said. “It’s confined to being a technical problem, and you don’t need a zillion dollars’ infrastructure.”

“Society needs higher-energy-density solutions,” Peter Bruce said. “There aren’t many options on the table. We have to explore the options that we have. Lithium-ion batteries will be with us for many years to come, and they’ll be key technologies in vehicles.” The reason Bruce and others like him have hope for the prospects of a livable, comfortable postoil civilization powered by electrons snared from the sun and generated from the wind is that, as grim as the cost estimates and think tank forecasts can sometimes be, we are just getting started. “I think the good thing about lithium-air, lithium sulfur is that at least there are some options,” Bruce said. “There is somewhere we can go.”

Excerpted from BOTTLED LIGHTNING: SUPERBATTERIES, ELECTRIC CARS, AND THE NEW LITHIUM ECONOMY by Seth Fletcher, published in May 2011 by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright (c) 2011 by Seth Fletcher. All Rights Reserved. Pick it up here.

Looks like we’re getting better, cheaper batteries soon: Sumitomo Electric Industries succeeded in developing a molten-salt battery that’s supposedly 90% cheaper to produce than lithium-ion batteries. The company claims that even though molten-salt batteries are nothing new, the sodium material in their prototype starts melting at 57C to keep the electrolyte in a liquid state (and not at more than 300C like in existing batteries).

The rechargeable battery is said to have twice the energy density of a typical lithium ion battery. In other words, makers of electric cars, for example, could save space and offer vehicles with a longer travel range. Sumitomo expects the new battery to be priced at about $240 per kWh, about 10% of the price of made-in-Japan lithium-ion batteries.

Sumitomo plans to start offering the battery for use in cars and homes around 2015 and already applied for a patent. Following the news, Sumitomo Electric Industries stocks soared a respectable 8% at the Stock Exchange today.

Via Response [JP]

Sanyo today announced it has sold 150 million eneloop-branded batteries at the end of December 2010. The company introduced its “green” sub-brand in 2005, and the eneloop product line-up was one of the main reasons Panasonic acquired Sanyo as a whole in December 2009 for $4.6 billion.

Sanyo says their eneloop batteries are available in over 60 countries currently. The newest version can be recharged about 1,500 times and recycled after use.

Sanyo is the world’s biggest producer of rechargeable batteries.

The ethical issues are strange here, because after all viruses are barely classified as alive by our definition of the word. They’re self-propagating organic molecules, to be sure, but that’s where the similarities end. Still, breeding billions upon billions of these things to go and destroy themselves by binding their rods to the battery walls seems somehow evil.

Maybe I’m just being sentimental. And of course it’s nothing compared with the liberties viruses take with our bodies.

At any rate, ethics considerations aside, the viruses attach themselves securely to the battery cell, and there they stay while the experimenters coat them in a conductive material. Essentially, the battery (Li-ion in this case) would be half metal ion, half molds of virus skeletons. Kind of creepy, don’t you think? I mean, self-assembly is cool, but the level of “intelligence” required to effect it makes you think.

More on the research can be found at the University of Maryland’s news section.

[via PhysOrg]

Sanyo keeps on adding products to its eneloop brand of eco-friendly, rechargeable batteries. Today the company announced the so-called KBC-9V3U Pedal Juice for the US and other markets, a 9V lithium-ion battery unit designed for charging multiple guitar effects pedals at the same time (it features two 9V outputs and can power multi-effect units and portable recorders, too).

Sanyo says that a full charge of the Pedal Juice takes approximately 3.5 hours. The device then offers up to 50 hours of power for a 10mA effects pedal, or up to 27 hours for a 100mA pedal board. According to Sanyo, the Pedal Juice is resistant to water (alcohol) and shocks and provides cleaner, more stable and quiet power when compared to conventional 9V batteries.

Sized at 65x42x120mm and weighing just 280g, it’s pretty compact, too.

In the US, the Pedal Juice is already available (for example on Amazon) for $150 (the MSRP seems to be $199.99).

Back in September, Panasonic announced an unusual publicity stunt: let a cute mini robot walk from Tokyo to Kyoto – powered solely by the company’s rechargeable EVOLTA batteries. The 1kg robot started the journey on September 23 in Tokyo, and today, Panasonic proudly announced the robot has arrived safely in Kyoto.

In other words, it took the the little guy about 2 months to travel 310 miles. To cover the trek, Panasonic set up a dedicated Ustream channel, a YouTube channel, an official website, and a blog (all in Japanese only). The robot was powered by a total of twelve EVOLTA batteries, which were charged daily.

Panasonic says that it moved at 2 to 3km/h and arrived in Kyoto way ahead of schedule (December 10).

It wasn’t the first time big P used the robot for a publicity stunt. In 2008, we blogged an EVOLTA-powered mini robot that climbed up a 500 meter high cliff at Grand Canyon. One year later, we’ve shown you how such a robot ran 24km on the famous Le Mans 24 Hours circuit in France (on 2 AA batteries).

Via Jiji [JP]

Can you imagine Sanyo without eneloop? Sanyo’s “green” sub brand is now 5 years old, and to commemorate the anniversary, Sanyo plans to roll out special batteries. They even issued an English press release to announce the so-called “eneloop tones glitter” battery pack.

Buyers will be able to choose between sets of AA and AAA-size 8-color nickel-metal hydride rechargeable batteries (in purple, pink, orange, yellow, light green, light blue, silver and black), which are supposed to convey a “luxurious feel” according to Sanyo. The company is actually making a big fuss out of these batteries, including showcasing them at design shows in Tokyo.

The battery packs will hit Japanese  stores on November 14 (prices: $28 for the AA batteries, $31 for the AAA pack).

Panasonic has apparently enjoyed quite a bit of success with its previous, rather unusual promotion campaigns for its EVOLTA batteries. In 2008, we blogged an EVOLTA-powered mini robot that climbed up a 500 meter high cliff at Grand Canyon. Then, in 2009, we’ve shown you how such a robot ran 24km on the famous Le Mans 24 Hours circuit in France (on 2 AA batteries).

And now Panasonic plans [JP] to let another model travel from Tokyo to Kyoto – no less than 500KM. But this time, the batteries will be recharged along the way (obviously). Details are a bit scarce right now, but the robot will start his journey on September 23. The trip will be broadcast on Ustream, and Panasonic also plans to tweet about what happens on the road, next to blogging [JP] about it.

The robot itself is sized at 150×400×200mm, weighs 1kg and will be powered by a set of AA size EVOLTA batteries (HHR-3MVS, on sale in Japan from October 1). The trip is scheduled to end on December 10.

The never ending story between Apple Japan and the local government may have finally come to an end. Following months of disputes whether overheating first generation iPod nanos pose a security risk (some iPods caused fire) or not, Apple last month announced it will put up a special warning message on its Japanese company site and offer to replace batteries in all models affected for free.

And now Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry posted a PDF [JP] on its official website according to which big A had to replace a total of 5,527 batteries last month. The ministry also says in the 3 weeks in August after Apple issued that warning [JP] on its website (on August 11), the company replaced 4,994 batteries – a big plus compared to June (62 batteries) and July (232) this year.

I am not a security expert and 5,000 is not a small number, but it looks like the Japanese government is slightly overreacting in this case. In the PDF linked to above, the ministry is again asking buyers of the first generation nano to get in touch with Apple as fast as possible and also provides contact details.

There will be two versions: one, the so-called “eneloop stick booster” (pictured above) comes with adapters (licensed by Nintendo) to power your DS and the other mobile devices mentioned above on the go. The other (dubbed eneloop mobile booster/pictured below) is not compatible to the DS – as is one of the stick type boosters, actually.

See this table for details:

Sanyo plans to roll out the chargers in Japan on October 21, but the company says that just the mobile booster will go on sale globally after its release in Japan (price for that model over here: $72).

It’s really, really not clear what’s going on here but if their tests bear fruit, you might soon be changing your shirt when it runs out of juice. Of course the military gets all the cool toys first, so we’ll have to wait our turn.

The company raised a $10 million Series A funding round from Charles River Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners.

The company raised an additional $6 million in a grant from the Department of Energy‘s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E). The funding will help 24M develop batteries that can store more energy for a lower price.

24M’s technology, created in collaboration with A123 and MIT, combines the best of rechargeable batteries, fuel cells and flow batteries to create new energy storage systems. Specifically, the company wants to create batteries that improve on the energy storage capabilities of lithium ion batteries. 24M especially wants to target the transportation and electric grid industries, with the hope of creating more affordable and effective electric car batteries, some of which currently cost upwards of $10,000.

A123 will continue its involvement in the venture by helping with product development and commercialization. A123 will also receive a seat on 24M’s board of directors and an equity stake in the company.

The $6 million grant 24M received comes from the Department of Energy and its APRA-E program. It is intended to help 24M commercialize its products in collaboration with Rutgers and MIT.

While it was my understanding that Steve Jobs owns a number of nickel mines and brings up tons of ore himself to stay in shape, pounding each core into a delicately wrought battery and then selling the produce of his labor as Apple’s rechargeable battery offering, it seems that Apple is actually using Sanyo Eneloop batteries, wrapping them in their own packaging, and selling them as their own. At least that’s what some Czech dudes think.

While Odin says we will suffer for our indiscretions before arriving in Valhalla, something like this cannot go unpunished here on Earth. See, after intense digging the Czechs discovered that the batteries were little more than Sanyo Eneloop HR-3UTGs. The worst thing? The Apple charger and four batteries costs $29 while the Eneloops cost $29 for eight batteries and a charger.

Heads will roll, people. Heads will roll. This level of perfidy is indicative of a deeper nest of vipers at the company. Or maybe Apple can slap their name on stuff and sell it at a premium. Who knows?

via Engadget

At first I thought these were like the “parametric generators” we saw back in March, but those harvest ambient harmonics. These batteries from Brother are designed to be shaken, not hummed at.

You’ve probably seen the flashlights that you can shake for a few minutes in order to get half an hour of light (they’re called Faraday flashlights, interestingly). Very handy — and smart, in that the power generator is the size of the flashlight itself and not contained within the battery. With kinetic harvesting, the more movement, the more space, the more force, the better. These things seem to work the same way, but because they have to put so much more in a small space, the power they can generate and store is necessarily lower. Occasional draws of 100mW seem to be the limit for now, which pretty much puts this in the “clicker” category. Well, good. I hate changing the batteries in clickers.

[via Obsessable]