Scientists Have Accidentally Invented A Battery That Lasts Forever

As technology improves, the bane of pretty much everyone’s lives is poor battery life. But now there’s a brand new nanowire-based battery that might just last forever.

Researchers from the University of California have accidentally-on-purpose invented the battery that can be charged hundreds of thousands of times without wearing out and will never need replacing.

Nanowires are super conductive and over a thousand times thinner than human hair, so they make for compact, powerful batteries — but they’re very fragile and break quickly.

So the clever researchers, just “playing around”, coated the gold wires in manganese dioxide and a Plexiglas-like gel, making them much stronger and longer lasting.

Mye Le Thai, the lead author of the study, has already charged and discharged the battery around 200,000 times without any sign of deterioration.

“Mya was just playing around… when we discovered that just by using this gel, [we] could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity.”

“This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality.”

But don’t get too excited — these batteries are in the very early stages and won’t be in our smartphones for a long time so you’ll just have to stay mad at poor battery life for a while.