A virus could increase lithium batteries capacity by 10x
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
But yes, electric vehicles are definitely the most in need of higher energy density batteries.
My Nokia regularly goes a week without a charge with light usage.
(I've heard tell the power management in the Symbian kernel far outstrips the competitors, which probably explains it.)
Etc.
It's not good enough until we can get at least 24 solid hours of use out of a modern phone with a big display (>= 3") while using at least one or two of the radios inside it (e.g. 3g and bluetooth).
At which point battery life will promptly drop back down to a couple of days.
But I'm in the seemingly tiny minority that cringe when they see "begs the question" misused, "should of", etc. Most people don't seem to care about these things.
"I know this seems like a semantic quibble, but words mean things."
One of my favourite quotes, no idea where it's from.
No faith in scientists, I tell you.
>>a factor of 50
Yes.
That difference doesn't imply that batteries can be improved at all, let alone by 50x.
There are lots of differences between batteries and gasoline and some of them may limit the energy density of batteries to be less than that of gasoline.
Even small differences matter. For example, diesel has significantly more energy per volume than gasoline. (I forget how the various alcohols rank.)
There are quite a few examples in history where great physicians have been wrong.
Maybe todays physicians are more careful because of that but let's see how radical the view on our universe changes in the future.
physician = doctor.
"It seems, therefore, on the whole most probable that the sun has not illuminated the earth for 100,000,000 years, and almost certain that he has not done so for 500,000,000 years. As for the future, we may say, with equal certainty, that inhabitants of the earth can not continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years longer unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation."
Lord Kelvin, http://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/on_the_age_of_the_suns_hea...
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
There is a space weight and power budget. Some of that budget could be spent on containment, or even just smaller more spread out cells.
"Poor corn plants, they grow them in overpopulated conditions, only to eat them at the prime of their lives"
Anyway, we kill pigs, which are actually intelligent, so if you're looking to get worked up about something, bacteria in batteries seem like pretty odd candidates.
are we already doing this?
and on a related note, i wonder how much viral mass a human gets when he/she is sick from a nasty flu.
Relevant question: To recharge them, will you have to feed them?
No.
Viruses do not have any sort of metabolism. They drift until they get into an appropriate target cell, at which point they hijack it and make it make more viruses. Therefore they do not need feeding at the best of times.
However in this case the viruses are being used as convenient particles that will stick to the electrode. We do not care about the health and well-being of the viruses at all.
Obviously, production of large amounts of viruses in the wild would have to be tightly controlled. The problem with TMV is that you need to really grow the virus in a plant, you can't just grow a vat of the stuff in an industrial fermentation facility. TMV is used pretty regularly for research, so people do grow big quantities. Probably the biggest industrial virus production to date would be certain kinds of vaccine production. But those quantities are tiny compared with what you would need if everyone started using batteries like these.
I speak of "viral mass" as a proxy to number of viral bodies, which is probably proportional to its power to mutate and do something unexpected, not inside the batteries but rather in the production thereof. What are we going to do -- create a farm of infected tomato plants? Are we going to evolve the virus until it produces more bodies faster?
I'm not so concerned about viruses that affect humans. I'm concerned about an epidemic of plant viruses, and everything we haven't thought about.
I wish teflon stayed on surfaces, certain chemicals didn't deplete our ozone layer, that we didn't have to ask questions about man-made global warming. But to assume that the things we produce would only have the desired effects with total disregard for physics and biology is, well, absolutely stupid.
On the other hand, I see this as an awesome opportunity to proceed with nanotechnology. After all, a virus is the ultimate self replicating robot.
"TMV becomes inert during the manufacturing process; the resulting batteries do not transmit the virus."