Currently, one of the greatest potential growth area in the technology industry, as well as one of the most neglected thus far, is battery life. Some improvements were made—we’ve seen the battery capacity increased and we’ve witnessed the apparition of new ways of charging batteries faster, but they still take a while to charge and are not exactly environmentally friendly. But things don’t stop here. A new solution seems to have appeared on the horizon, one made possible by a radical material shift. Scientists at the Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a new battery (well, technically speaking it’s a supercapacitor, we’ll develop more on this later), made from 3D printed graphene, which is said to hold a larger charge of energy, is recharged in only a matter of seconds and will last a lifetime. Take for instance the Pokémon Go app, it drains smartphones so fast that companies, aware of the power of this new app, are now marketing their products by hosting events where they give external batteries to players who present their devices showing under 10 percent battery life left. Initially, many place the blame on the app, but in fact, the problem is not in the app, but in the lithium batteries that can only take a very limited charge. Currently, the dominating energy storage device is the lithium-ion battery. These power nearly every portable electronic device, as well as almost every electrical car. Batteries store energy electrochemically, where chemical reactions release electrical carriers that can be extracted into a circuit. The supercapacitor uses a different storage mechanism—energy is stored electrostatically on the surface of the material, without involving chemical reactions. Given their fundamental mechanism, supercapacitors can be charged quickly, leading to a very high power density, and do...

Power banks are no longer an innovation, but a Latvia-based firm designed a new device it hopes will differentiate itself from the rest. Draugiem Grupa came up with CoalBit, a 23-gram, 2×1.4-inch coal-shaped portable power bank which features a 560mAh battery, enough to juice your smartphone with three hours of talk-time, two hours of surfing the Internet, or listening to 10 hours of music. And this is not all. CoalBit includes a flashlight, in case you need one handy. But the novelty that makes the Latvian device differentiate itself from the rest comes from the inclusion of a Bluetooth locator which enables it to sync with any smartphone. By syncing it with the phone you can keep track of both your phone and whatever you attach to your CoalBit. Due to its small size, misplacing it is easy (as is your smartphone). The developers thought about it and found a solution: you can enable a distance alert that will buzz your phone when you get a little too far away from the tiny power bank. In the event you’ve lost it somewhere and haven’t enabled the feature, the firm built an app, available on iOS and Android platforms, which will inform you of the CoalBit’s last known location. Furthermore, in case of emergency you can send an SOS signal to your friends and family. Pretty cool feature, no? Like what you’re reading? Draugiem launched a Kickstarter campaign that you can back, aiming to reach an $84,000 funding goal that will enable them to finish development and begin production. The firm offers two versions of the product—the basic one, CoalBit Lite which removes the Bluetooth locator, and the regular one, CoalBit Standard, with all the features described above. In addition, CoalBit comes with either an...