Warning: heating earbuds batteries to over 300F also causes fires
Reading this tells me the author has absolutely 0 idea of how physics work and is nothing but a blogger of consumer grade equipment. People like that should refrain from trying to understand how science or scientists work.
I think you mean they shouldn’t write authoritatively about things they don’t understand, because what you said is really gate keepy. There’s nothing wrong with learning.
People shouldn’t compare things to gatekeeping unless they can build a cast iron gate
Obviously, physics aren’t done in Fahrenheit.
Had to laugh at your comment. Not that it matters in this case, your ear buds are not going to magically combust at just 150°C
They’ll not combust, I’d hazard a guess that air pods are made from ABS which has a glass transition temperature of 105C, so they will melt.
ABS which has a glass transition temperature of 105C, so they will melt.
Well, they’ll deform. ABS won’t melt at 150°C, it’ll just become soft and flexible. But yes, it’s a bad idea for your earbuds.
Dimethyl carbonate boils at 90° so the battery could pop
Good news everybody!
I hope this article is well peer-reviewed. Otherwise this reads as if some LLM came up with the idea
Otherwise this reads as if
some LLM4chan came up with the ideaRemember kids, updating to iOS 7 enables your phone to charge wirelessly in the microwave.
The “peer” that reviewed it was another LLM.
Well if it was a human it wouldn’t be a peer, would it
Connection reset by peer.
Is this before or after they reach the spicy pillow stage?
I think before, but there’s a trick for spicy pillow just poke a vent hole, trust me I was in IT for 6 years ;p
i was just thinking i could use an excuse for some skin grafts
The trick is to let them apply this heat themselves.
I tried it on my car but it doesn’t turn on anymore. Deceiving news
Sounds like a 4chan prank, but… 🪦
This turns everyone else on, though.
Yes but how can shareholders profit from this??
By not switching to Na based batteries and keeping a lid on Li mining.
Even BYD is betting on Na tho.
By making battery renewing devices.
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Thanks, I just threw up a little bit
Glad to be of assistance. May I offer you TOTO’s Extra Platinum Plus subscription tier that helps handle non-standard bodily waste, at only $7.99/mo for 24 months…
Important note near the end of the article - they aren’t saying we should cook batteries really -
“The team’s hypothesis is that the structural disorder developing inside LIBs may become a “tunable parameter” that, if tweaked using chargers at precise voltages to alter said battery composition, could be used to rejuvenate the batteries in our tech without fires.”
This is a good old idea that goes back to the days of desulfating lead batteries with powerful shocks of high-amperage current. Might just need a special Healing Charger that applies the right voltage/current to dissolve the bad crystals in lithium-ion systems
I remember recovering dead 18650 cells from laptop batteries and “restoring” them with a 12V modded PC PSU. Quite a few of them actually started working again and had some capacity for a few tens of additional cycles. Those cells were never left unattended in a charger and they were always only used in a device you could chuck in a moment’s notice.
10/10 do not recommend.
How did that process work? Did you just connect the +/- ends of the cell to the +/- 12v wires of the PSU and let it feed from the high-amp outputs? Imagine there’s plenty of amps on the GPU and CPU power wires
Yup, just plugged it in there. The internal resistance of these cells was high enough that it limited the current somewhere between 3-8A. And this was done only briefly as these cells got quite…warm.
With electric cars you might not even need a special charger so much as a special charging cycle. Its already the norm for cars to tell the charger what voltage and current they want, and its already the norm for cars to carefully control their battery’s temperature during charging.
That’s not to say you’d necessarily be able to do this with just a software update, but its not too far off from the current paradigm.
Yeah that’s a good point. Ours uses the same refrigerant system as the AC to cool the battery, and the actual “charger” for the battery is inside the car being controlled by its software etc. The cables that plug in on the outside are technically just power wires, with the charging brains inside the car. That would be amazing if they could update the software to rejuvenate the battery once a year or something.
it would almost certainly need to be done at a fast charger, not at home unless it could do only a few cells at a time. Remember the golden rule: “Don’t set the house on fire by overloading the wiring”.
Well, there is some data/rumours out there, stemming from a Dutch Tesla forum, that suggests that some fast charging might be beneficial for battery longevity. This seems to corroborate that. I can’t remember the case for always fast charging, though.
Oh God I can already see all the questionable “Restorer Chargers” and the like from Temu that will be more likely to burn down the house…
this feels like bait
In reality, this doesn’t affect the existing batteries we have, it’s just for future battery technology.
Cue dumbasses tossing their iphones in the toaster oven in 3… 2…
I love the typo because it covers so many things at once
Queue as in they’re lining up to do it; cue, as in that’s their cue to be stupid; and que (spanish for what) as in what the fuck are they thinking?
I was gonna say there’s no typo but the comment has been edited. What was it originally? Que?
Yup, que
Microwaving the iphone was close to the right answer.
What, you didn’t know you had to crank the power to high before microwaving your phone? Rookie mistake
¿Que dumbasses?
putting it over the stove.
This title is pretty bad, the paper focus is in designing new battery technologies not magically restoring capacity on the batteries we have today.
Is the paper in the article? I couldn’t find it.
Would you be so kind as to link us?
it is this one: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08765-x
Sure. But we need to see pics, or it didn’t happen.
The abstract doesn’t mention them re-gaining their old capacity. It only says they shrink. And something about voltage. So I have my doubts. I mean it’s nice if my spicy pillow shrinks a bit. But what does that help if it continues to stay nearly dead? And an application in products would be hard to accomplish. At that temperature, all the plastic etc is going to melt. Maybe the solder as well.
Yes. If you aren’t reading any battery tech article with a huge amount of skepticism you are doing it wrong. More than any other tech sector I can think of, battery research is just absolutely plagued with low quality research that consistently gets picked up by media outlets.
It might be less the quality of the research and more this:
(This comic is a bit outdated nowadays, but you get the idea).
Except the headlines say “scientists report discovery of miraculous new battery technology using A!”.
Also i think people don’t realize how long it takes to commercialize battery technology. I think they put them in the same mental category as computers and other electronics, where a company announces something and then its out that same year. The first lithium ion batteries were made in a lab in the 1970s. A person in 2000 could have said “I’ve been hearing about lithium ion batteries for decades now and they’ve never amounted to anything”, and they would be right, but its not because its a bunk technology or the researchers were quacks.
All true, but I am going to be that nerd and point out that there were indeed commercial devices with lithium ion battery packs in them in the mid to late '90s, especially so in the late '90s. By 2000-2001 you couldn’t escape the damn things in cameras, disc players, PDAs, etc. So yes, it did take relatively forever for the technology to become commercially ubiquitous, but not that long. (And yes, the first couple of waves of Li-Ion batteries were indeed crap, and had all of us geeks clamoring for gadgets that still took AA’s for a while.)
Hmm, you’re right. At a guess, this field might represent the maximal combined interest of both scientific and pedestrian readership within technology research, since on the one hand energy density and storage logistics is the key limitation for a ton of desirable applications, and on the other most consumers’ experience with batteries establish them as a major convenience factor in their day-to-day.
Edit: you’re*
How does heat mitigate the dendrites? Also doesn’t extreme heat damage the batteries? They barely hold up under high temperatures as-is.
I think it has to do with whether or not the battery has a current going through it while hot. I imagine heat probably makes the lithium more soluable in the electrolyte liquid, then the disolved material migrates with the current flow. Heating it without a current flow might allow it to redissolve and at least distribute it more evenly so it doesn’t make one long spike that shorts the battery.
Sounds like “microwave to charge” for the modern era.
Neat! So if I put my phone in the microwave it will reset the battery?
Only if you want it soggy, air fryer works better
So is a toaster the new wireless charging hub?
brb, putting e-bike battery in oven
One simple trick to make your ebike fly.
deleted by creator
turn you into ghost rider.
Oven, 450?
Nah, set it to broil for optimal results /s
