Samantha Rose Hunt07 April 2009, 4:00 PM
Scientists at MIT have engineered a virus which is potentially capable of forming a battery which is three times more powerful than all batteries available today.
The battery would be able to power items such as mobile phones, MP3 players, and eventually even vehicles. The revolutionary battery would be much more environmentally friendly than the battery technologies available today.
The virus type, being called M13 is usually found in bacteria and not humans. The genes in M13 were modified to collect negatively charged particles and then build a small, powerful electrode using carbon nanotubes and metal compounds. The electrode would then be able to produce a batter which is not only faster but also more powerful than lithium batteries.
"It has some of the same capacity and energy power performance as the best commercially available state-of-the-art batteries," Angela Belcher, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientist leading the research stated.
"We could run an iPod on it for about three times as long as current iPod batteries. If we really scale it, it would be used in a car," she also stated, however, at present scaling to that magnitude is nowhere close to being possible.
Currently MIT is developing a second generation battery using materials which allow for higher voltage and electrical capacity; this would be used commercially, and for reproduction.