My latest article for TheFeature is about new battery designs for mobile devices, from an onboard nuclear trickle charger that harnesses radioactive energy to a microbattery made with the same techniques used to fabricate computer chips.
"In late 18th century, Italian physicist Luigi Galvani shocked the public by demonstrating that an amputated frog's leg twitched when touched with certain metals. Galvani was convinced that energy stored in the frog's leg caused the jerk. He called the accumulated juice "animal electricity." Galvani's friend Alessandro Volta called it nonsense. To prove that the energy came from the metal, not the flesh, Volta eventually made a sandwich of silver, moist cardboard, and zinc. His device also spurred frogs' legs to spasm. In the end, Volta won the intellectual battle and also invented the battery. Two hundred years later, the technology hasn't changed much."