Viruses Tapped To Create Spray-On Batteries 70
disco_tracy writes "Two different viruses have been used to create the cathode and anode for a lithium-ion battery. If research pans out, the parts could be grown in and harvested from tobacco plants and then woven into or sprayed onto clothing to power a wide range of electronic devices."
Re: Really? (Score:1, Informative)
Wow, what could possibly go wrong?
From the article (if you were wondering): "The MIT and Maryland scientists used two viruses that are harmless to humans."
Re:Why must every technology always be for soldier (Score:3, Informative)
I worked (briefly) in military research. Back then, they considered 20 years to be a good length of time from original idea to battlefield deployment. The problem was that this applied universally. For a new design of jet engine, it made sense - you need a lot of testing to even get to the prototype stage, and then mass production takes even longer. Unfortunately, for integrated circuits, it's insane. It means that you had state of the art mechanical systems controlled by a Z80. You get the next-generation battlefield communication system that ends up having less bandwidth, less interference robustness, and worse encryption than cheap off-the-shelf solutions by the time that it's actually deployed.
Defence contractors are allowed to license a lot of their designs to third parties before they produce a shipping product for the military. Consumer products have much bigger economies of scale (because most people aren't soldiers) and can go through half a dozen incremental iterations by the time the military variant finally ships. The first consumer-grade version is often much worse than the military-spec version, but by the time the military version is released the consumer version often catches up. For other things, there is no real civilian market (one of the things I was looking at, for example, was the applicability of a number of head-up display technologies for gaming - mostly they were too bulky for civilian use and cheaper alternative already existed). This means that military tech ends up being a weird mix of stuff that's miles ahead of anything you can get elsewhere and stuff that is painfully obsolete, often in the same machine.
The adage about the military fighting the last war is doubly applicable when it comes to technology. Funding is given to projects that would produce something at the end that is useful now. Unfortunately, they produce something in twenty years time when, even if it is a great bit of tech, it is no longer useful to the military. Sometimes this stuff gets licensed for civilian use, but quite often it just gets ignored.