Microbatteries made out of M13 viruses |
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Everything's going mini today (even Paris Hilton's collection of toy dogs), that's why it's becoming more and more imperative for science to come up with batteries that will fit these mini-everything-gadgets.Well, it seems like a team of MIT researchers also do recognize this need, and that's why they created a microbattery small and powerful enough to be able to run a range of miniature devices. Oh, and it's made of viruses. But some of these devices they are looking to use their breakthrough creation on are labs-on-a-chip and implantable medical sensors.
The MIT team composed of professors Angela Belcher, Paula Hammond and Yet-Ming Chiang put into place mini-electrodes with the M13 virus to create the small battery, measuring 6.5 nanometers in diameter and 8880 nanometers in length. What comes next is putting in the cathode, which is the positive electrode that receives electrons from the device the battery is powering. To do this, they used their viral assembly technique. According to Belcher and company, "Cathode materials are currently being investigated for a full self-assembled microbattery."
Their breakthrough procedure is reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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Comments [refresh]
even qj pictures is so mini i cant see the damn battery
I saw this on the science channel about a year ago. Really fascinating stuff. They actually used a virus on one side of a disk to create a positive charge and another virus on the other side to create a negative charge. The only problem with this is that its going to put a lot of battery companies out of business as the viruses never die, meaning the battery lasts forever. Pretty awesome but I'm interested in seeing how the battery companies deal with this. It might be a repeat of that Carburator that saves gas and never needs to be replaced. Remember how the auto/oil companies bought the idea and destroyed it so it could never be used and they could continue making billions?
You'd need a microscope to see something 6.5 nanometers.
Not smart. Viruses? Good work though.