I don’t think I want to poke further at your meaning of “demographic” problems. Suffice to say like most things there is likely multiple confounding factors, but l didn’t come up with this theory myself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-violent-crime-epidemic/

I have worked in the past in dementia care and have seen first hand the massive financial and emotional damage it causes. Once again we find that crony capitalism (that is why we ever had leaded gas in the US in the first place, It never was approved in Europe) and specifically the fossil fuel industry has profited off from the rest of society like a cancer. Sucking profits from the mass of humanity and the globe itself like the most cancerous parasite one can imagine. BTW there is another theory that the crime spike in the 1970’s in urban environments that disappeared in the 90s was also due to leaded gasoline.

It’s foolish to assume all cobalt, nickle, etc will only come from virgin sources in the future. We don’t throw away the lead in lead-acid batteries. We only need enough of those materials (with current chemistries) to get pool of available material to support sustainable loop.

I think you are thinking too small. This is one of many recent studies/breakthroughs showing we can use solar energy at high efficiency to produce highly useable / highly valuable carbon material products. This may be the path towards sustainable atmospheric Co2 regulation through large industrial production of carbon materials. Potentially replacing existing materials such as plastics. Mega Large carbon based space habitats? Building materials? Revolutionizing energy storage and production is just a small potential benefit.

Not necessarily the end of the world. Lower cost would enable higher capacity packs for cars and allow the use of hybrid chemistry packs (like the packs from Williams Advanced Engineering that was covered by this website on the 6th of this month). One can imagine for vehicles 100-150kWh packs that can deliver current to operate within normal highway speeds and a small high power pack for acceleration. Similarly for electric aviation, we are right on the cusp of the required energy by weight for long distance flight. These would be extremely large packs (thousands of kWh’s), which would likely be able to provide enough power for takeoff. But even if not a relatively small high power pack to boost energy output for takeoff would be a pretty trivial addition.

Potential additional validation of Elon Musk’s strong words regarding Lidar being “a fools errand” at their Investors meeting on the 22nd. Specifically I thought his comment that if you are going to utilize active photon generation why do so within the visible light spectrum, as you can already solve for vision with passive sensors and use radar band generation to gain super sight ability when visible light spectrums are affected by poor conditions. Consider that no one has really solved the weather problem with Lidar: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-17/self-driving-cars-still-can-t-handle-bad-weather I think the blind confidence that Lidar is the solution to self driving cars is misplaced. It may prove to be useful, but we shall soon find out if it is truly necessary.

Keep in mind very high capacity, but expensive batteries have a place in many demanding environments such as electric airplanes, aerospace and military applications.

I doubt their production estimates, but looking forward to this being a new source of surplus LTO batteries.

This is phenomenal, probably the most promising li-s development I have seen. Looks like the most commercially viable as well, the whole power is an excellent read.

180 being higher than current lithium-ion’s is incorrect. Perhaps there are some lithium ion batteries that this has a higher energy density than, but this does not compare to the current state of the art which is about double. However if it possesses existing super capacitor characteristics such as virtually unlimited cycle life and extreme current capacity then it is still very revolutionary. Handheld railguns here we come. I could also see a small super capacitor bank in conjunction with a large low power density, but high density lithium pack such as lithium sulfur.

I've always admired 3M and the quality of their products. I'm really excited to see that they are involved in next-gen battery chemistry products and am definitely excited about the progress specifically in Silicon and Sulfur battery components of lately.

It's a terminology issues. They aren't saying they are limiting the total amount of power able to be stored in the batteries but rather limiting the total amount of power drawn from the batteries in a time period during a race and also the total amount recoverable from regen. http://arstechnica.com/cars/2014/06/high-tech-hybrids-are-2014s-hottest-race-cars/

Maybe NASA can get some real product here. I swear If we ran the space race and the nuclear program like we have battery development we would still be hearing about labs announcing promising results on a rocket that may be able to get us to the moon in 3-5 years! "University of take-your-money United has announced their research team under Professor P. Admywallet has designed a nuclear warhead they believe will yield 10-20 MT of explosive power. "With three to five more years of grad students paying me to do my work, we'll be ready to announce our next breakthrough!" Said Professor P. "This project is completely novel, unlike the other research team at Northern B.S.U which produced a remarkably similar result using similar materials but they used an ball shaped explosive charge whereas we used a oval shape." More press releases are expected soon!

The fact that at c/40 the capacity was still sloping up at 1,000 cycles is incredible. They must have switched the same cell from c/20 to c/10 and c/2 so we don't get to see what that does to capacity fade. Obviously internal losses and cell heating is significant, to the point of c/2 or 1c causing obvious cell damage. This doesn't seem to be an intrinsically high power chemistry but costs and total cycle life could be the real test for certain applications.

Lad, Thanks for posting that PDF, lots of great info in there. Everyone else, the reason there aren't specific capacity numbers (which everyone loves to start dreaming of the possibilities with) is this is an actual material science advance. Basically they are saying utilizing Stabilized Lithium Metal Powder (SLMP) instead of Lithium foil or other forms of Lithium in batteries enhances many aspects of existing chemistry's (such as LiCoO2) and enables/improves some advances chemistry's such as Si Composites. Read the PDF and look at some of the examples, this is a hard release with info from dozens of partner labs. The reality is there are hundred of battery labs all over the world analyzing battery materials at a molecular level utilizing computing tools and imaging technologies that never existed before the last few decades. If you really think we aren't going to see fundamentally different battery capabilities within the next 5-10 years then prepare to be surprised. You are making a bet against market forces and manufacturing improvements that rarely ever pays off. Oh and Gor.. Go away troll.