Someday We’ll get our Gadget Power from the Sun
Remember when you got your first solar-powered calculator and you played around with the solar panel on the calculator's face, making it turn off and on just by covering the cells? Remember how cool that was? No? Well, maybe it was just me. In any case, despite the tendency for gadgets to be huge power sucks these days and the limitations in chemical battery technology, solar batteries haven't gotten much love beyond the old school calculator. Fortunately, the necessity of powering the ever-shrinking gadget means that people are going to need to find new solutions to the problems of the battery…and in between watching rounds of the World Cup, some very smart scientists in Germany are doing just that. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute are working to develop super thin batteries that wrap around the inner electronics of your gadget of choice and have possibility of using solar cells as a source of backup power. As someone who's had his cellphone run out of juice on several innopportune occasions, the possibility of having a phone charge (or at least run on standby) with solar power is very exciting, but I'll have to wait a bit: the technology is a long ways off from being production-ready.
