Recreating Tesla's Wireless Power Experiments

via Gizmodo by Sean Fallon on 6/12/09

If you have a thing for Tesla coils (and who doesn't really) you will be interested in this experiment/history lesson about wireless power put on by Omega Recoil at this year's Maker Faire.

During the presentation, they provide some background on Nikola Tesla's experiments and attempt to recreate them by powering a light bulb wirelessly at various distances. It works of course—in 1899 Tesla managed to transmit 100 million volts of power over a distance of 26 miles where it lit up a bank of 200 light bulbs and an electric motor. So why haven't figured out how to do this on a large scale over the last 100 years?

New Lithium-Sulfur Batteries Could Last 3x Longer Than Lithium-Ion

via Gizmodo by Dan Nosowitz on 6/10/09

Scientists at the University of Waterloo have designed a lithium-sulfur battery that, thanks to nanotechnology, is capable of 3 times the power of lithium-ion batteries with equal volume while remaining both lighter and cheaper to produce. Long-distance electric cars, anyone?

The different atomic structure of the battery and knowledge of nanotechnology are what make this battery different. They used "mesoporous carbon, a material that presents a highly uniform pore structure at nanoscale level," to allow for a more efficient design:

The team assembled a nanostructure of carbon rods separated by empty channels, sulfur was then melted to fill the tiny voids thanks to capillary forces. All the spaces were uniformly filled with sulfur, thus maximizing the surface area in direct contact with carbon and boosting battery efficiency.

We've been needing a new battery technology for awhile now, especially for electric cars, so here's hoping they can get these lithium-sulfur batteries into production as soon as possible and that they deliver on the possibilities we see here. If it really is capable of three times the batter life, we're talking about something like a 730-mile range on a Tesla, 20 hours on a MacBook, or half a week on an iPod, all without added bulk or expense!