Hasta La Gadget!

Renewable energy has been one of the most researched topics ever since gas and oil prices have begun to rise and people have paid attention to their effects on the environment. Making your home run on renewable energy can be quite challenging and in some instances (very) expensive, but a research team at Rice University has just discovered a way to make it a lot easier to create energy and even store it.

Imagine being able to take a bottle of substance and spray it on a wall of your house. Then the sprayed substance converts the sun’s energy into renewable solar energy and even stores it for you. Rice Universities researchers have come up with the designs to this and possibly many other types of spray-on batteries.

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By Ubergizmo. Related articles: New battery electrode could last 40,000 charge cycles, NEC’s new battery technology said to last twice as long,

With the number of gadgets and gizmos that are in our possession these days, it makes perfect sense that we always have one thing at the top of our minds at all times – that is, the battery life of our devices. This is even more glaring when we are talking about going traveling – the number of chargers that we need to pack, in addition to the right adapter (especially when one is heading off for a foreign country on a different continent altogether), could prove to be quite a headache. Not only that, newer devices come with better and faster functions, so much so that advancements made in battery technology keep up with just enough to last as long as its previous generation, as it caters to the new features.

How about the idea of spray painting your own batteries? This is where future batteries might be headed, as one is able to paint batteries onto standard bathroom tiles, steel, glass – and even a beer stein! This particular battery is made possible thanks to five separate layers, where each of them has its own recipe, and together they measure a mere 0.5mm thick – or should we say, thin?

In order to demonstrate this particular technique, the team behind the battery actually spayed the batteries onto steel, glass, ceramic tile and a beer stein. This breakthrough will definitely be of particular interest in industrial applications, since it is compatible with current spray-painting technology. Right now, the most common batteries comprise of negative and positive halves (the anode and the cathode), with a material in between to separate them, while “current collector” layers are located at the top and bottom to gather up the electric charges which move through.

Plenty of batteries are constructed in a geometry that is not too far off from that of a “Swiss roll” cross section, where layers are rolled up into a cylindrical or round-edged rectangular shape. Guess the spray on battery idea from Rice University in Texas, US, has paved open a new way to place batteries on just about any surface.

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[ Batteries of the future can be painted on copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

A battery that can be spray painted? That certainly sounds like quite the novel idea, and it has been implemented by researchers over at Rice University, allowing virtually any object to be converted into an electricity storage device. This particular lithium ion battery can be applied in layers, where each of them is an aerosol paint, paving the way to possible solar-energy applications. The researchers in the team are Charudatta Galande, Pulickel Ajayan and Neelam Singh, where they have displayed a test device for their paintable batteries which in reality is a grid of nine ceramic tiles that has been merged with a solar cell and an LED array. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: New memory might help smartphone batteries last the distance, Prieto Battery has a lithium ion battery that is 1,000 times more powerful in the works?,

Just yesterday we saw details leak of RIM’s new BlackBerry handsets, with touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard offerings that will both run BlackBerry 10. N4BB is back with yet another leak, this time of the revamped BlackBerry Messenger that will debut along with the new version of the operating system. The biggest change seems to be a redesigned user interface with an eye-catching color scheme.

In fact, the company will supposedly use several different themes for BBM in Blackberry 10. The first mixes things up with a white and green color scheme that looks surprisingly easy on the eyes, while the second adds black into the mix. There’s a technical reason for that change: both handsets detailed yesterday will make use of OLED screens. When presented with pure black elements, OLED pixels completely turn off, unlike LCDs which are still backlit regardless. That can lead to drastic power savings, with one of the leaked BBM slides estimating a 25% decrease.

Tweaking the colors even further in favour of darker tones such as grey and blue will lead to even bigger savings: 75%, or so the slide claims. It’s a trick that manufacturers such as Samsung have used in the past to maximize battery efficiency combined with aggressive auto-brightness settings. Otherwise, feast your eyes on the redesign above and below, which seems to fall in line with what we’ve seen so far from BlackBerry 10.

[Thanks, Jack.]

BBM design for BlackBerry 10 leaks is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
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