Cut me a piece of battery, will ya?
The above is a battery that looks like a piece of paper and can be bent or twisted, trimmed with scissors or molded into any shape needed. While the battery is only a prototype a few inches square right now, the researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who developed it have high hopes for it in electronics and other fields that need smaller, lighter power sources.
The battery uses paper infused with an electrolyte and carbon nanotubes that are embedded in the paper. The carbon nanotubes form the electrodes, the paper is the separator and the electrolyte allows the current to flow.
The researcher at the Center for Biotechnology Studies at Rensselaer want to develope this to a point where batteries can be printed like newspaper – millions of them on a roll of paper.