I’m not talking about computer viruses here, but the biological kind. A team of researchers at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering and College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (still reading?) has managed to harness and exploit the self-renewing and self-assembling properties of viruses in order to build a new generation of small, powerful, and highly efficient batteries and fuel cells.
The researchers started with the rigid, rod-shaped (no jokes, please) Tobacco mosaic virus, which looks like uncooked spaghetti under an electron microscope (how that spaghetti got under a microscope, I’ll never know). TMV is a plant virus that plays hell with tobacco, tomatoes, and more. Anyhoo, in the lab researchers have been able to harness the characteristics of TMV to build tiny components for lithium ion batteries. They can modify the TMV rods (no jokes, please) to bind perpendicularly to the metallic surface of a battery electrode and arrange the rods in patterns. Then, they coat the rods with a film that acts as a current collector. The result increases the electrode’s surface area and its capacity to store energy. So think about that the next time a virus has your own internal battery feeling depleted.
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