Stanford scientists spark new interest in the century-old Edison battery

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-06/su-sss062112.php

[font face=Serif]Public release date: 26-Jun-2012

Contact: Mark Shwartz
650-723-9296
Stanford University

[font size=5]Stanford scientists spark new interest in the century-old Edison battery[/font]

[font size=3]…

Designed in the early 1900s to power electric vehicles, the Edison battery largely went out of favor in the mid-1970s. Today only a handful of companies manufacture nickel-iron batteries, primarily to store surplus electricity from solar panels and wind turbines.

"The Edison battery is very durable, but it has a number of drawbacks," said Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford. "A typical battery can take hours to charge, and the rate of discharge is also very slow."

Now, Dai and his Stanford colleagues have dramatically improved the performance of this century-old technology. The Stanford team has created an ultrafast nickel-iron battery that can be fully charged in about 2 minutes and discharged in less than 30 seconds. The results are published in the June 26 issue of the journal Nature Communications.

"We have increased the charging and discharging rate by nearly 1,000 times," said Stanford graduate student Hailiang Wang, lead author of the study. "We've made it really fast."

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms1921

[Neoma]

1. Sure it wasn't Nikola Tesla?

[PoliticAverse]

4. Edison was the developer and promoter...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery

[Lionessa]

2. In this day and age, battery advancements are really important.

This is good. It opens up more resources for long use durable, reliable batteries. Wider range of resources, hopefully means we use less of each and do less harm. Maybe.

[PoliticAverse]

3. A little longer article from Science News...

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/341802/title/Old_battery_gets_a_high-tech_makeover

[bongbong]

5. Intestesting factoid about Edison's battery

According to the chemist (Byron Vanderbilt) who wrote the book "Thomas Edison, Chemist", Edison's 1915 battery design was never surpassed (in metrics like efficiency, charge per pound, etc). The book was written in 1971.

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. About “factoid”

It doesn’t mean a “small fact.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Factoid[/font]
[font size=1]From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/font]

[font size=3]A factoid is a questionable or spurious (unverified, false, or fabricated) statement presented as a fact, but with no veracity. The word can also be used to describe a particularly insignificant or novel fact, in the absence of much relevant context. The word is defined by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as "an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact".

Factoid was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer described a factoid as "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper", and created the word by combining the word fact and the ending -oid to mean "similar but not the same". The Washington Times described Mailer's new word as referring to "something that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact".

Factoids may give rise to, or arise from, common misconceptions and urban legends.

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If you will, “factoid” was Norman Mailer’s equivalent of Stephen Colbert’s “Truthiness.”

[bongbong]

7. Well....

I was using "factoid" in its popular, albeit incorrect, sense.

[OKIsItJustMe]

8. So, the irony is…

Back 20(?) years ago, CNN started putting little facts up on the screen, which they labeled as “factoids.” I think this is what popularized the usage.

So, you see, this misuse of “factoid” is a perfect example of a “factoid.” (i.e. it is a definition invented by the news media. It’s not the real definition, but it seems like a plausible definition.)

[bongbong]

9. Popular usage

Many words end up having their popular definition overtake their "real" definition. Factoid is one of them.

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. Understood

I found CNN’s misusage of “factoid” to be amusing at the time. Now, I find it kind of sad, because, apart (perhaps) from “Truthiness,” I really don’t know of a better word to express what Norman Mailer was criticizing. (i.e. a falsehood, generally accepted as truth, because of frequent repetition by the news media.)

Admittedly, I struggle with (and am fascinated by) the aspect of a “living” language, where the definitions of words change, sometimes to the extreme of becoming their own antonyms.