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...