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Thomas Edison's failed rechargeable battery may get a second life

Popular Science

Technology Engineering Thomas Edison's failed rechargeable battery may get a second life The famed inventor's nickel-iron idea isn't suited for EVs, but it could help solar farms and data centers. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A rechargeable battery based on technology pioneered by Thomas Edison may finally get its due. But while the famous inventor envisioned nickel-iron batteries powering the automobile industry over a century ago, researchers now believe the underlying concepts are more suited for renewable energy centers. According to a study published in the journal, a team including engineers from the University of California, Los Angeles have developed a prototype battery that recharges in seconds and withstands over 12,000 cycles of use--an equivalent to over 30 years of daily activity.

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What Happens When a Chinese Battery Factory Comes to Town

WIRED

Chinese firms are building battery plants from Europe to North America, promising jobs while prompting local concerns about the environment, politics, and who really benefits. When the rest of WIRED subscribers get their hands on our next print magazine, you, dear readers of Made in China, can proudly say you heard about it here first. The issue is all about China and includes stories about robots, AI boyfriends, a Chinese town that became the crystal capital of the world, and a Chinese DNA database built for family reunions. Like this newsletter, the issue is our attempt to document how deeply Chinese technology now shapes everyday life--no matter where you live in the world. As part of the issue, I reported a story on how Chinese lithium battery companies like CATL, BYD, and Gotion are now building factories on nearly every continent.

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Level Lock Pro Review (2026): Smart but Stylish

WIRED

You'd never guess this lock is smart by looking at it, and that's my favorite part. No bulk or screen; looks like a regular lock from both sides of the door. Impressive design with the battery hidden inside the lock bolt. App is beautiful and easy to use. Best with accessories that need to be purchased separately.

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Chinese EV Batteries Are Eating the World

WIRED

China's lithium batteries aren't always "made in China." Companies like BYD and CATL are building factories on nearly every continent. THE symbolism was clear last June when Emmanuel Macron, surrounded by factory workers, held up a sleek lithium battery in his right hand and a mining lamp in his left. He was in Douai, a northern French city with a coal mining history dating back to the 1700s. The city is now also the site of a battery factory, which would allow France to produce all parts of electric vehicles domestically. This factory, Macron declared, represented an "economic and ecological revolution."


The Download: sodium-ion batteries and China's bright tech future

MIT Technology Review

Plus: This company is developing gene therapies for muscle growth, erectile dysfunction, and "radical longevity" For decades, lithium-ion batteries have powered our phones, laptops, and electric vehicles. But lithium's limited supply and volatile price have led the industry to seek more resilient alternatives. They work much like lithium-ion ones: they store and release energy by shuttling ions between two electrodes. But unlike lithium, a somewhat rare element that is currently mined in only a handful of countries, sodium is cheap and found everywhere. Read why it's poised to become more important to our energy future. Sodium-ion batteries are one of 10 Breakthrough Technologies this year.


Giant phantom jellyfish spotted deep in Pacific

Popular Science

These rare sea creatures live where the sun don't shine. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Like a scene out of a Jules Verne novel, scientists from Schmidt Ocean Institute recently encountered a giant phantom jelly (). The enormous deep-sea jellyfish was spotted about 830 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean by a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) exploring the Colorado-Rawson submarine canyon wall off the coast of Argentina. ROV pilots filmed this giant phantom jelly, or Stygiomedusa gigantea, at 253 meters during an ROV descent to explore the Colorado-Rawson submarine canyon wall.


Cozy up (safely) to an e-scooter's lithium battery yule log

Popular Science

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is well known for getting their point across on social media. A seven-minute montage of mannequins succumbing to 4th of July firework injuries may be an unconventional way to warn about the dangers of recreational explosives--but try forgetting those images when lighting your next bottle rocket. In similar pyrotechnic fashion, the CPSC is warning everyone to take extra care during the holidays when it comes to all kinds of combustible, seasonally appropriate objects. On December 22, the commission illustrated how some gifts are far more flammable than others with its 30-minute Escooter Lithium-Ion Battery Yule Log video.


An Integrated System for WEEE Sorting Employing X-ray Imaging, AI-based Object Detection and Segmentation, and Delta Robot Manipulation

Giannikos, Panagiotis, Papakostas, Lampis, Katralis, Evangelos, Mavridis, Panagiotis, Chryssinas, George, Inglezou, Myrto, Panagopoulos, Nikolaos, Porichis, Antonis, Mastrogeorgiou, Athanasios, Chatzakos, Panagiotis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract-- Battery recycling is becoming increasingly critical due to the rapid growth in battery usage and the limited availability of natural resources. Moreover, as battery energy densities continue to rise, improper handling during recycling poses significant safety hazards, including potential fires at recycling facilities. Numerous systems have been proposed for battery detection and removal from WEEE recycling lines, including X-ray and RGB-based visual inspection methods, typically driven by AI-powered object detection models (e.g., Mask R-CNN, YOLO, ResNets). Despite advances in optimizing detection techniques and model modifications, a fully autonomous solution capable of accurately identifying and sorting batteries across diverse WEEEs types has yet to be realized. In response to these challenges, we present our novel approach which integrates a specialized X-ray transmission dual energy imaging subsystem with advanced pre-processing algorithms, enabling high-contrast image reconstruction for effective differentiation of dense and thin materials in WEEE. Devices move along a conveyor belt through a high-resolution X-ray imaging system, where YOLO and U-Net models precisely detect and segment battery-containing items. An intelligent tracking and position estimation algorithm then guides a Delta robot equipped with a suction gripper to selectively extract and properly discard the targeted devices. The approach is validated in a photorealistic simulation environment developed in NVIDIA Isaac Sim and on the real setup.


Tiny but Mighty: A Software-Hardware Co-Design Approach for Efficient Multimodal Inference on Battery-Powered Small Devices

Li, Yilong, Zhang, Shuai, Zeng, Yijing, Zhang, Hao, Xiong, Xinmiao, Liu, Jingyu, Hu, Pan, Banerjee, Suman

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are inherently modular, consisting of vision and audio encoders, projectors, and large language models. Yet, they are almost always executed monolithically, which underutilizes the heterogeneous accelerators (NPUs, GPUs, DSPs) in modern SoCs and leads to high end-to-end latency. In this paper, we present NANOMIND, a hardware--software co-design inference framework for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) that breaks large models into modular ``bricks'' (vision, language, audio, etc.) and maps each to its ideal accelerator. The key insight is that large models can be broken into modular components and scheduled to run on the most appropriate compute units. It performs module-level dynamic offloading across accelerators on unified-memory SoCs. By combining customized hardware design, system-level scheduling, and optimized low-bit computation kernels, we demonstrate our framework with a compact, battery-powered device capable of running LMMs entirely on device. This prototype functions as a self-contained intelligent assistant that requires no network connectivity, while achieving higher throughput and superior power efficiency under strict resource constraints. The design further bypasses CPU bottlenecks and reduces redundant memory usage through token-aware buffer management and module-level coordination. Our system outperforms existing implementations in resource efficiency, cutting energy consumption by 42.3\% and GPU memory usage by 11.2\%. This enables a battery-powered device to run LLaVA-OneVision with a camera for nearly 20.8 hours.