Once upon a time, I was at some press conference somewhere dealing with laptops and someone in the audience asked why battery technology hasn’t improved. The exec on stage replied something to the effect of, “Batteries aren’t our industry, they’re a chemistry problem.” So your laptop’s awful battery life can be blamed on chemistry.

Until now!

Researchers in South Korea, led by one Prof. Cho Jae-phil at the Hanyang University, have developed a new type of lithium battery that lasts as long as eight times as long as traditional lithium batteries. So, for example, your laptop that gets five hours of battery life all of a sudden gets 35 hours of battery life. That’s significant, yes?

Keep in mind that this new tech is only just developed, in a university no less. That is, it’ll be a little while before it moves into consumer products. But, good to see some progress being made in battery technology.