First nonflammable lithium-ion battery will stop your smartphone, car, and plane from exploding

Lithium-ion batteries, despite being one of the most important pieces of modern technology, have always had a particularly grievous flaw: they’re highly flammable. If you puncture a lithium-ion battery, or you charge and discharge them improperly, you’ll usually have a pretty bad fire on your hands — or worse, if the conditions are just right, an explosion. Most notably, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner was grounded in 2013 due to its lithium-ion battery packs causing electrical fires mid-flight, but there have also been a fair number of stories about exploding smartphone batteries recently. Now, long overdue, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill say they’ve built a nonflammable lithium-ion battery.

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are prone to be incendiary and explosive for two reasons: because they’re pressurized, and because their electrolyte — the charge-carrying liquid that sits between the positive and negative electrodes — is flammable. The electrolyte in an LIB is nearly always a lithium salt dissolved in an organic solvent, and most of these solvents are highly flammable. Because of these factors, LIBs are generally manufactured to a very high level of quality, but that doesn’t help you if the battery is somehow pierced (as in the Tesla Model S battery pack that was impaled and burst into flames), or if thermal runaway occurs.

Now, if you mutilate an LIB or throw it haphazardly in the trash, you’re asking for trouble. (Always recycle your batteries!) Thermal runaway, however, is a much trickier problem that’s inherent to LIB tech, and which you can’t do a whole lot about. Basically, in the process of charging or discharging a lithium-ion battery, it warms up. This is just the battery chemistry in action, and is completely normal. If it discharges too quickly, though, or you overcharge it, you can rupture one of the battery’s cells. This rupture can then cascade down the line of cells, potentially causing a fire or explosion. This is why the peak power draw from LIBs is fairly low, and why there has been some discussion about whether LIBs are the right technology for high-power applications, such as electric vehicles and grid power storage.

The most common cause of LIB thermal runaway is likely faulty charging circuits. The battery itself could be suffering from a manufacturing fault, too. When the cells rupture in some cases, an LIB will just swell up rather than explode. We still don’t know what caused the Dreamliner battery fires, but it’s probably just a case of Boeing underestimating peak draw, or an inherently faulty battery design (it uses just a few big cells which are prone to cascading failure, rather than Tesla’s approach, which uses lots of smaller cells).



The University of North Carolina’s breakthrough is to replace the electrolyte’s flammable organic solvent with nonflammable perfluoropolyether (PFPE). PFPE is usually used as an industrial lubricant, and the lead researcher – Joseph DeSimone — had originally been looking at using PFPE on the bottom of ships to prevent marine life from sticking, which is a serious problem in the world of shipping. He realized that PFPE had a similar structure to another solvent used in LIBs, so he did what any sensible chemist would do: tried dissolving a lithium salt in PFPE to see what would happen. As luck would have it, it worked just fine. He created a nonflammable lithium-ion battery.

DeSimone and his team still need do more testing to see if the nonflammable electrolyte can withstand the rigors of everyday use, but the research paper puts a pretty positive spin on things: “These electrolytes not only are completely nonflammable, but they also exhibit unprecedented high transference numbers and low electrochemical polarization, indicative of longer battery life.” Moving forward, the team will now begin with the arduous task of bridging the gap between laboratory testing and industrial mass production.

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Flappy Bird’s removal from the app store: A case for piracy

Flappy Bird’s developer, Dong Nguyen, has broken his radio silence to say that he pulled the game for the sake of your well-being. Nguyen said he originally developed the game to help people relax and blow off steam, but instead it became an “addictive product” that caused harm to its players. I guess the game might still return, if Nguyen has a change of heart, but it seems unlikely at this point.

Flappy Bird. Over the last few weeks, this almost insultingly simple Helicopter clone with Mario-like graphics has experienced one of the craziest roller coaster rides in the history of gaming. At the beginning of January, despite the game originally being released way back in mid-2013, no one had even heard of Flappy Bird — and yet, for reasons no one yet understands, when the game peaked at the start of February, it was being downloaded millions of times per day, and accruing the developer, Dong Nguyen, hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue. If its meteoric rise wasn’t weird enough, though, get this: Yesterday, citing the trials and tribulations that the game had brought him —  ”Please give me peace… I cannot take this anymore… I just cannot keep it anymore” – Nguyen removed Flappy Bird from the iOS and Android app stores. If you already downloaded Flappy Bird, you’re free to keep playing it — but if you’re a late to the party, you’ll sadly never know the frustrajoy of repeatedly bashing your small avian brain into green pipes. Unless, of course, you pirate it.

At the time of writing, there are thousands of people downloading Flappy Bird from The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites, and direct download (DDL) sites are moving a lot of copies as well. Usually, of course, I am against depriving game developers of their income, but Flappy Bird is an odd edge case where piracy may actually be acceptable. At the very least, even if you flat-out disagree with piracy on ideological grounds, read the next few paragraphs — you might be surprised at how they challenge your ideals and worldview. (Read: Why I pirate.)

A case for piracy

Flappy Bird is a free game. It generates revenue by way of ads that pop up when you die. We haven’t exhaustively checked, but the pirated versions of Flappy Bird appear to still have ads. We haven’t confirmed if the ads are still linked to Nguyen’s advertising account, or if the pirates have switched them over to their own accounts. Let’s assume (perhaps a little optimistically) that Google and Apple would crack down on advertising accounts used by pirates, and that the ads are still paying money to Nguyen.

 It’s kind of hard to imagine what it must be like, going from a handful of downloads per day for seven months — the game was originally uploaded to the Android and iOS app stores in May 2013 — to millions of downloads overnight.

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New LIDAR chip will sharpen aerial mapping and autonomous car vision

Handheld laser rangefinders have been available to consumers for years, but increasingly powerful military and industrial versions of the technology are still being developed. A new breed of LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology is being developed and tested by the US Air Force at a base in Massachusetts. This system is capable of precisely mapping over 300 square kilometers from the belly of an airplane in about half an hour.

While it is considerably more advanced than consumer models, the new Air Force LIDAR works on the same basic principle– laser light is projected toward the target, and a sensor detects the photons upon their return. The time it takes is used to calculate the distance, to varying degrees of accuracy. In advanced systems like those used by the military, LIDAR can create a topographic map of the area it is pointed at.

LIDAR has been used for aerial mapping of disaster areas and remote archaeological sites, but the process has always taken time. After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, a system similar to the one being developed by the Air Force was able to capture a 600 square-meter section of Port-au-Prince at 30cm pixel resolution in a single pass. The chip at the heart of the next generation system is about ten times more powerful.

The Air Force system makes the process a snap by packing an unprecedented number of single-photon pixels detectors into the microchip at the core of the unit. The key to the LIDAR’s incredible speed and resolution is semiconductor technology based on indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs). These III-V semiconductors (so-called because they are made from metals in periodic groups III and V) are seen as a potential replacement for silicon in numerous applications. In this case, InGaAs semiconductors operate in the infrared spectrum, which allows for the use of longer wavelengths of light that can travel farther and scan wider areas.

InGaAsWhile these new systems are still secret, the results from chips of the type used to map Port-au-Prince are beginning to make it into industrial applications. Princeton Lightwave and a division of Boeing have both been working with single-photon InGaAs LIDAR that could one day be incorporated into automated vehicles like Google’s self-driving cars.

Current LIDAR systems are huge and are based on visible light and silicon. That means to see more than a few meters a system would need to be uncomfortably bright. Of course, InGaAs-based LIDAR has to come down in price first — Princeton Lightwave’s current industrial model costs $150,000, but it’s the size of a shoebox.

Princeton Lightwave is already in talks with car manufacturers to build a prototype LIDAR system that could point the way to the future. The military LIDAR capable of mapping cities in mere minutes won’t be much use to consumers, but it might come in handy for the greater good the next time there’s a natural disaster.

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Happiness is a warm iGun: Dumb gun requires smart watch to shoot

Despite Apple’s impending release of a supposed iWatch, the non-phone smart device industry hasn’t yet taken off. Gun company Armatix hopes to take the smart device industry by storm with its new smart gun system.
Armatix iP1 is a .22-caliber hand gun that has something of a symbiotic relationship with a paired smart watch. Thanks to a built-in RFID chip, the watch’s proximity to the gun acts as a safety. If the watch is within a close proximity, the gun will unlock — displaying a green light on the grip — and allow itself to be fired. If the watch isn’t within range, the gun won’t fire. The system is yet another step to make guns safer without making them “safe” by completely removing the public’s right to keep and bear arms.

At the beginning of this year, angel investor Ron Conway — early investor in Google and Facebook — launched a $1 million contest for inventors to create smart gun technology. In a somewhat juicy buzz quote, he said, “We need the iPhone of guns,” referencing the iPhone 5S’ Touch ID sensor. Of course, that kind of technology would ultimately need to be improved, as Apple’s Touch ID is much too finicky for a life and death situation, nor would it help your family member if you’re not around and they need to access the weapon in an emergency without having previously keyed in their biometric data.

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Silk Road 2.0 ‘hacked’ for millions, community tearing itself apart.

 
Hackers like to play the cynical, world-weary intellectuals, but an awful lot of them still seem to go down with knives in their backs. More to the point, they often spend brief periods defending those who did the stabbing, refusing to be taken in by “government lies” about divisions in their precious community. The stubborn, almost sentimental refusal to quarantine friends is what felled many important members of Anonymous, and what brought down prominent international criminal organizations like Carders Market. The Deep Web provides a fog of war that can be exploited by anyone — by criminals to operate markets and discussion forums, by police to attack them, and by anyone at all to rob them blind.


Yesterday, one of the operators of the Silk Road posted a long and emotional comment to the dark market’s official forums which laid out the situation: “We have been hacked.” Somewhere between $2.4 and $2.7 million in Bitcoins has disappeared from the Silk Road’s custody thanks to — well, it depends who you believe. Earlier this month, the largest Bitcoin trader Mt. Gox made waves by refusing to continue direct Bitcoin withdrawals due to an alleged “bug” in Bitcoin’s fundamental design. The bug, called transactional malleability, could theoretically allow canny attackers to trick a wallet into thinking that a transaction has been denied, causing the wallet to resend the payment. Using this bug, someone was able to completely empty the Silk Road’s escrow account.

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