Chemists one step closer to new generation of electric car battery

Another minor advance in surface chemistry, heavily overpromoted. This seems to be standard operating procedure in "nanotechnology". At least the headline says "one step closer", not "invented new battery".

They made a similar announcement back in 2009: (http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v8/n6/full/nmat2460.html). Here's what they said six years ago: The Li–S battery has been under intense scrutiny for over two decades, as it offers the possibility of high gravimetric capacities and theoretical energy densities ranging up to a factor of five beyond conventional Li-ion systems. Herein, we report the feasibility to approach such capacities by creating highly ordered interwoven composites. .., Reversible capacities up to 1,320 mA h g-1 are attained. The assembly process is simple and broadly applicable,... That battery turned out to last for only two or three charge cycles. Now they claim to have fixed that.

There are at least eight other LiS battery research projects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery) and at least three startups (oxisenergy.com/) (sionpower.com/) (polyplus.com). Sion Power has shipped some usable batteries, which were used in the Zephyr, a solar/battery powered all electric UAV that stayed up for 14 days.

Does anyone know if there's a site that tracks all the "major breakthroughs" from the various sciences and treats them as a thing with a lifecycle, so you can go back and check whether "fantastic result X" has any of the following?

- followup papers / research

- additional grant money

- commercialization steps achieved

That's what would be really great: treat each of these as the start to a potentially longer story.

"Very few researchers study or even teach sulphur chemistry anymore," said Nazar. "It's ironic we had to look so far back in the literature to understand something that may so radically change our future."

I wonder if is there a structured database of scientific material to address such research?

No, it's expected. Fundamental science rarely "ages", it just might be a while before it can find applications. I hope for a future where scientific discoveries don't fade, they are just input into some distributed semantic database as a "fact". Combined with researchers who are taught to use these tools and to think in a multi-disciplinary fashion, this could really accelerate the pace of discovery and invention.

Wonder if "improved" battery idea is much easier to sell to investors who maybe not as tech savvy, but nevertheless everyone thinks they can understand the idea of "better battery" rather than say special coating for turbine blades.

There's so much of it just sitting in huge piles it's effectively free.