Respect for the Lightest Metal. And Best Battery.

If Wikipedia is trustable on lithium batteries I learned three things today:
1 - They mostly degrade just from shelf life, no matter what you do to them: up to 20% loss per year at room temperature, much more if hotter.
2 -  Letting them go below their lower limit voltage is bad.  Overcharging probably not dangerous, not even possible anymore with internal safeguards.  The voltage monitoring circuitry is right inside the battery pack, not in the computer.  So almost a bigger hazard is putting them away on the shelf long enough for them to dip below that 8 v threshold or whatever.  I let that happen to laptop #1.  (I'm on #3 now, just bought a netbook last week).
3 - M.I.T. demonstrated a full sized battery with smaller internal atomic structure thanks to -- how cool is this, virus-grown fiber structure inside.  They engineered the viral DNA to contain/attract iron, and so have achieved the smallest iron phosphate wires ever (iron phosphate is one option for the cathode material and the smaller the better)

Comments

[Peter]

If they ever make an affordable electric car, it wouldn't surprise me if it involved viruses.