MADISON: Scientists at the University of Wisconsin report they have made a breakthrough. Carbon nanotubes may extend battery life for some electronic devices at some date in the near future.
Carbon nanotubes are invisible to the naked eye, but they are great conductors of electricity. They have shorted out in past experiments. That may have changed.
A team at UW has succeeded in attaching polymers to the conducting nanotubes, which eliminates the shorting out problems. They could be useful in replacing the silicon in computer chips or help the batteries in cell phones last longer.
The work has already been patented. The biggest hurdles left include being better able to reproduce the technology and scale things up.
