[HN Gopher] MIT engineers design tiny batteries for powering cel...
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MIT engineers design tiny batteries for powering cell-sized robots
Author : meysamazad
Score : 99 points
Date : 2024-08-16 14:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Headlines like this show the branding power the big schools have.
| If it's one of the big ones the headline is "<School name>
| scientists do X". If it's a small or international school, it's
| "Scientists do X", never "Boise Community College students do X".
| the__alchemist wrote:
| MIT is notorious for these PR hype articles.
| mhb wrote:
| Huh? It's an MIT publication.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Point made; It's not Boise Community College publication!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It 's not Boise Community College publication_
|
| You're comparing a research university with a teaching
| college. In respect of a research announcement. Like, yeah
| the College of Western Idaho also doesn't get much PR for
| its football team.
| vpribish wrote:
| Headline like this are what is eroding MIT's reputation. They
| have overhyped things so many times that I actively avoid
| reading anything they put out.
| buescher wrote:
| Alrighty then. "a current of up to 1 volt". Any science or
| engineering journalist, even at MIT News level, could get that
| wrong, but not all of them. They should have better fact-
| checking.
|
| Neat application though. Obviously, don't expect to buy one next
| week. But what's interesting here is that you'd think that
| electrochemical cells, which are going to scale by volume (cube
| law) as they get smaller, would not be as effective in these
| micro-scale applications as the energy harvesting/wireless energy
| schemes people seem to like work on, which mostly scale by
| aperture/area (square law). They treat that in passing,
| basically, the problem with solar is sometime's it's dark, but
| it's not very edifying.
| cushychicken wrote:
| That was the first thing I saw too and my eyes immediately
| glazed over.
|
| No reason to read the rest of this fucker! XD
| adoyle wrote:
| The text says "a current with a potential of up to 1 volt." The
| key word is potential, i.e. electrical potential whose SI unit
| is the volt. That must be the amount of potential that this
| particular chemical reaction can create. Since the current
| probably depends on the amounts of the chemicals involved, the
| article doesn't state that.
| mlyle wrote:
| The text now says that, yes, but the original did not
| according to archive.org.
| buescher wrote:
| It's an elegant fix that adds nothing.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| It's an article about new battery tech with no mention of power
| density, energy density, or even the word "watt". Instant tab
| close.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| It's the university's press release for a paper published in
| a scientific journal:
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.ade4642.
|
| Scientific press releases are usually poorly written, by
| people who don't necessarily understand the science. Look at
| the paper if you want details.
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| This might be a dumb question, but I wonder what the lifespan of
| this battery is. When the zinc oxidizes, the electrode eventually
| becomes less effective as an anode right?
| passwordoops wrote:
| Not a dumb question at all, and something I hope they address
| in the actual publication, which is what should have been
| linked to instead of the usual shoddy PR
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.ade4642
| passwordoops wrote:
| For anyone interested in substance:
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.ade4642
| Neywiny wrote:
| The paper says they got 760 wh/l which isn't bad. Normal zinc-air
| is 2.5x that, but these small ones aren't that different to
| lithium ion. I think that's pretty great.
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