Mya Le Thai, a doctoral student at the University of California, made the best mistake of her life! By simply messing around in the lab at the university, she accidentally created the perfect configuration to create a battery.
Not just any battery, mind you, but a battery that can be recharged over and over again over a span of 400 years!
Thai was working on an experiment alongside researchers in the lab.
They were experimenting with nanowires that could be used in batteries. Unfortunately, not matter how much they tried, the nanowires kept breaking down after multiple charges.
That’s when Thai had a random thought that led to their greatest breakthrough: she coated a set of those nanowires in manganese dioxide and an electrolyte gel, and voila! This new battery can be charged upwards of 200,000 times while only using about 5% of its total battery capacity!
To put that in perspective, the average laptop battery can be charged between 300 to 500 times.
With this newly invented battery, a laptop battery could last through 200,000 cycles in a span of three months, making the battery essentially last up to 400 years!
This battery would be expensive to manufacture as it stands now, but Thai and her team are working on a product with a nickel substitute to keep it on the cheaper side.
Thanks to Thai’s miraculous mistake, this glorious new invention, the amount of waste created by batteries would plummet to an almost non-existent number!
