Ah yes, another amazing battery technology guaranteed to make everything from electric cars to cell phones charge instantly. This one comes from boffins in South Korea, who have added carbon networks to lithium-ion batteries to make them charge anywhere from 30x to 120x faster.
To picture how this works, think of a battery like an empty ice cube tray. There's a bunch of little compartments, each one of which needs to be filled separately with water before the ice cube tray is "charged." So, to charge up the ice cube tray, you go to the sink, turn on the water, and fill each compartment one at a time. This is really annoying and takes approximately forever. Batteries work the same way: you have "fill" the electrode material from the outside in, one particle at a time.
Now, imagine that instead of filling your ice cube tray directly from the faucet at the sink, you instead create a special ice cube tray attachment that has a faucet adapter on one end and then separate tubes that pipe water to each compartment individually, all at the same time. Hook this thing up to the faucet and turn it on full blast, and instead of filling one compartment at a time, you can now fill all the compartments at once, vastly increasing your ice cube tray filling efficiency. The new battery technology works exactly the same way: a network of carbon "pipes" forms channels that ferry electricity all over the battery all at once, allowing it to recharge anywhere from 30x to 120x faster.
It's a little bit unclear how close this technology is to commercial production, but considering how often we write about amazing new battery tech and now rarely it actually shows up in a product, it's probably safe to say that it'll be a while before we see these batts in cars or electronics. Still, we here at DV!CE have faith (however potentially misplaced) that eventually, tech like this will trickle down to us peons and we'll finally be able to stop worrying about charging stuff all the time.
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