battery

OK, I'll admit, this isn't really a new idea.  A lot of hearing aid and medical-use batteries are powered by zinc, air, and water which combine to make Zinc Oxide, giving off electrons in the process.  Called ZOE batteries (Zinc Oxygen Energy) or ZAFC (Zinc Air Fuel Cell), the technology is common on a small scale, but until now was not thought to be possible on a larger scale.  Like, say, the size of an electric car.

A Hong Kong Company called Advanced Power and Energy Transportation (APET) has a prototype car they're calling the Salamander.  It's running on a combination of Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) and ZOE batteries.  They plan to get rid of the NiMH batteries soon and go all-ZOE instead.

I keep abreast of the latest with electric vehicles (EVs) for my writing over at Zoomilife and out of my own general interest and saw this at one of my favorite sites Gas2.0.  While intrigued with the car idea, I was even more interested in the battery technology itself–for a lot of reasons, which I'll show you here.

The common problems with scaling up a Zinc battery have always been their relative weight, the high cost of materials, and the fact that they can't be recharged in the traditional way.  So up to now the only large-scale Zinc batteries have been as experimental military, industrial, and other uses.  APET seems to have solved these problems with their ZOE system.

Banana Shaped USB Battery Charger

This banana shaped USB powered battery charger is just absolutely bananas. It's very "appeal-ing". Ok, maybe it's a bit stupid but I'm pretty sure this is the first novelty battery charger we've covered here so here you go. The shape does make sense for batteries- long and narrow. It can fit both AA and AAA batteries, charging them via the USB cable. The banana body lights up while it's charging. You even "unpeel" the banana to put your batteries in.

There are some rare earth metals that are vital to electric motor production, lithium-ion battery storage, and other electric vehicle concerns.  One of them, dysprosium, is essential for almost all electric motor and generator applications: cars, wind turbines, and more.

A recent report in the Times Online says that China currently holds 95% of that and other rare earth metals’ production.  Byron King, an analyst of commodities, puts that number at 97% and the Financial Times says it’s over 90%.  Any of those three numbers says that not only are these things rare, they’re under the almost exclusive control of China.

Since dysprosium is so vital to electric vehicle and motor production, does this mean that we’re trading energy dependence from one foreign power to another? Going from the MIddle East to China with our energy dependence?

When I travel, I always make sure to bring along all my cameras, phone, laptop, chargers, etc. It's a lot to carry around, but I'd rather lug it all around with me than forget something and find myself disconnected from my technology. Still, there have been times where I've been stuck in an airport with no laptop or no way to charge my phone. The future looks slightly less bleak with something I noticed at the Dallas Fort Worth airport on my way home last night.

It's called PowerPort and it handles all your charging problems in one spot, prints, gets you online, and offers up laptops to rent.

Charge anything

When I first heard about this update through my friend I questioned it because why would Apple jump from firmware 2.2.1 all the way to 3.0? Well in fact, when I looked it up, it is dead true. Now I'm here to tell you about it. Apple is planning a major revamp of its OS which includes many cool things that might just blow your mind when you put it all together. There are loads of features, 100 last time I counted but these are the ones that I decided to highlight.

iPhone 3.0 Software

Push Technology

Apple was late to the push technology game and so when it released it, it basically killed the battery life. Now, it's reconfigured its system so that it eliminates background processes and thus improves battery life. This makes the iPhone more business friendly because it automatically updates you if you receive new mail for instance even when the application isn't running.