Sodium-ion battery breakthrough could make external chargers safe on flights

Lithium-ion batteries are so ubiquitous that you're probably reading these words on a device that has one installed right now. They charge fast and can hold a lot of juice for your laptop or phone, but they rely on lithium, which must be mined, and they can explode—making them a risk when left next to your bed or in an unmanned part of a plane.

Luckily, a new breakthrough means we may be able to move on from them. A new experiment performed by researchers at the Tokyo University of Science has yielded promising results with sodium‑ion batteries, after earlier work found that sodium ions got jammed when trying to flow into the porous hard carbon these batteries require.

As ions enter the part of the battery that stores them, the build up of their charge creates a repelling effect that slows the whole process and can stall charging. Sodium ions require less energy to cluster together and charge up a battery, and it's far easier to obtain sodium—we can pull it out of seawater using electrolysis.

Japan, Tokyo