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Wired: Have you ever been in desperate need of an AAA battery (your TV remote control is running out of power) and all you can find in your house are AAs or some other incompatible size of battery?

Three designers claim to have the solution. Pyeong Joo Goh, Jong Seung Choi and Ji Soo Hong have created the AtoD rechargeable battery, which can be squashed to fit the device that you need to power.

The battery is made from memory foam and so will retain its shape until you squash it for a different device.

It will then gradually become bigger again when you remove it for recharging. It provides 1.5 volts of nickel hydroxide power, but there’s no indication of whether it will make it beyond the concept stage.

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BBC News: A new manufacturing method for lithium-ion batteries could lead to smaller, lighter batteries that can be charged in just seconds.

Batteries that discharge just as quickly would be useful for electric and hybrid cars, where a quick jolt of charge is needed for acceleration.

The approach only requires simple changes to the production process of a well-known material.

The new research is reported in the scientific journal Nature. Because of the electronic punch that they pack, gram for gram, lithium-ion batteries are the most common rechargeable batteries found in consumer electronics, such as laptops.

However, they take a long time to charge; researchers have assumed until now that there was a speed limit on the lithium ions and electrons that pass through the batteries to form an electrochemical circuit.

Gerbrand Ceder, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, and his colleagues used a computer simulation to model the movements of ions and electrons in a variant of the standard lithium material known as lithium iron phosphate.

The simulation indicated that ions were moving at great speed. “If transport of the lithium ions was so fast, something else had to be the problem,” Professor Ceder said. That problem turned out to be the way ions passed through the material. They pass through minuscule tunnels, whose entrances are present at the surface of the material.

However, the team discovered that to get into these channels, the ions had to be positioned directly in front of the tunnel entrances – if they were not, they could not get through.

The solution, Ceder discovered, was to engineer the material such that it has a so-called “beltway” that guides the ions towards the tunnel entrances.

A prototype battery made using the new technique could be charged in less than 20 seconds – in comparison to six minutes with an untreated sample of the material.

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PSP News: The ultra portable gaming device PSP depends on its battery life. A good quality battery can give you long gaming sessions at home or anywhere else. The Battery is just like the PSP’s heart. The PSP needs the battery to live and work. DragonPlus provides you with high-power and good quality PSP batteries.

DragonPlus is a third party manufacturer that manufacturers PSP products that can boost your PSP’s power and performance. DragonPlus has come up with its latest high power battery. Its latest product is known as Max Power X5 Battery 3600mAh.

The all new battery is specially designed to give users long gaming sessions. The Max Power X5 Battery 3600mAh offers 5 times more power than your original battery. The standard mAh of a PSP battery is 1200 but this battery possesses 3 times that with 3600 mAh. The Sony PSP replacement battery comes with slightly more mAh than the orginal, but as much as the Max Power.

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TechRepublic: It appears that Sony has developed a type of battery that generates electricity from sugar. This mirrors the biological process that happens in living organisms.

Initial tests cells were able to generate up to 50 milliwatts, which is enough electricity to give you music playback on a memory-based music player. Says Sony in a statement released in Japan, the output is the highest for a bio battery of this type.

According to Information Week: “The battery generates electricity through the use of enzymes that break down carbohydrates, which is essentially sugar. Sony has increased battery output by efficiently immobilizing enzymes and the electronic conduction materials, while retaining enzyme activity at the anode, an electrode through which positive electric current flows into a polarized device.”

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