It’s natural to think that viruses are evil. After all, the entire world is being ravaged right now by a virus. However, in the near future viruses could make amends by revolutionizing battery technology as they power batteries that significantly outperform current models.
Wired explains:
In 2009, MIT bioengineering professor Angela Belcher traveled to the White House to demo a small battery for President Barack Obama, who was just two months into his first term in office. There aren’t many batteries that can get an audience with the leader of the free world, but this wasn’t your everyday power pouch. Belcher had used viruses to assemble a lithium-ion battery’s positive and negative electrodes, an engineering breakthrough that promised to reduce the toxicity of the battery manufacturing process and boost their performance. Obama was preparing to announce $2 billion in funding for advanced battery technology, and Belcher’s coin cell pointed to what the future might hold in store.
A decade after Belcher demoed her battery at the White House, her viral assembly process has rapidly advanced. She’s made viruses that can work with over 150 different materials and demonstrated that her technique can be used to manufacture other materials like solar cells. Belcher’s dream of zipping around in a ‘virus-powered car’ still hasn’t come true, but after years of work she and her colleagues at MIT are on the cusp of taking the technology out of the lab and into the real world.
As nature’s microscopic zombies, viruses straddle the divide between the living and the dead. They are packed full of DNA, a hallmark of all living things, but they can’t reproduce without a host, which disqualifies them from some definitions of life. Yet as Belcher demonstrated, these qualities could be adopted for nanoengineering to produce batteries that have improved energy density, lifetime, and charging rates that can be produced in an eco-friendly way.”
As great as virus powered batteries sound it’s that idea of a virus powered car that I’m really drawn to. Without even knowing any of the logistics or what exactly that car would look like I’m completely astonished and hope that we one day get to the point where that really happens. Forget about wanting a Tesla. I’d be first in line for a biological car for sure. Just so long as the virus being used to power it isn’t COVID-19!
Is a virus powered battery or car the Greatest Idea Ever?
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