Why Lithium Batteries SUCK

Can Hannah convince Michael that the lithium-ion battery is one of our most overrated inventions to ever happen? Hannah makes her case using a surprising energy source hidden in your fridge, a bell in Oxford that's been ringing since 1840, and a metal that is useful… but prone to bursting into flame from the inside out. Tracing the battery's strange history, from a twitching dead frog to the executed man who helped inspire Frankenstein. But the real point runs deeper: we don't have an energy problem, we have a storage issue, and until we crack it, the clean energy future stays just out of reach. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterChief Digital Officer: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Science. I am Michael Stevens.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  And I'm Hannah Fry. And today, Michael, I just, to be honest with you, I just, I just want to rant about lithium batteries for 45 minutes. Is that all right? You okay with that?

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Oh, I would love that. I, I, what is there to rant about? I know so little about them. I thought they were great.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  No, they're pathetic. They're pathetic. And actually, we could do a lot better. That's, um, that's essentially what I'm going to be doing this time. I'll tell you what, let's, let's start off, right? You're in, you're in a room, you've got, um, you've got a few things going on around you. See if you can just point out the most energy dense thing in the room. So I'm not talking about here, you know, I'm not talking about like fusion or fission here. I'm talking about like-

• 0:40Speaker 00

  What's the most massive thing? There you go. That's the most energy. You mean, energy we could get using traditional means?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  I've got firewood.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Which is pretty good. You burn that, you get, you're getting 16 megajoules per kilogram, which is good. It's a good start. It's pretty decent stuff there.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Okay. I don't really have a benchmark here, but let's just compare it to something like, I've got fire starters, wax soaked with petrol, with gasoline. Not really. It's, really, it's just some hydrocarbon. I don't know which one, but it's very, very volatile.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Well, TNT, TNT, not quite as good as wood in terms of the amount of energy you get per kilogram. Uh, you're getting about 4.6. Your, your lighter fluid, if that's up there with the petrol, I mean, that is, that's pretty good. You're getting sort of 45, 46. I don't know if you've got any oil there, any cooking or butter maybe?

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've got olive oil. I've got butter.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  They're all great. 37 for, for olive oil, slightly higher by the way than for butter, which is 30 megajoules per kilogram. Um, your body fat, actually, anything that you're storing in your belly, that's, um, that's great, that stuff. 39, 39, 40 or so. Not yours specifically, Michael, anybody's, any, anybody's.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  I don't, how do you know? My fat could be special.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Well, maybe it has been infused with petrol because, um, because that would, that would pump it up a bit. Petrol is pretty phenomenal in terms of, of its energy density. All of these, by the way, look absolutely gigantic compared to lithium batteries, right? Lithium ion batteries, you're getting less than one megajoule per kilogram, right? If you had, if you had the choice between a slab of butter or human body fat and a bit of a lithium ion battery, you would be a fool. You would be a fool to ever go for the lithium ion. It's pathetic, Michael.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  I didn't realize. Where, where is human body fat?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Uh, human body fat is about 40, 39, 40.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  The fat in your butt cheek is 40 times more energy dense than the fanciest lithium battery in your phone.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  But, but, but I mean, obviously, I can't just liposuction my belly and then put it into a machine to charge my phone, but I can very easily plug a battery in and out of something.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  I mean, okay, you, you could, it just wouldn't be, it wouldn't be very sustainable, right?

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Oh, that's true too. Yeah.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, I think replenishing, I mean, it'd be quite a fun way to live, right? Eat as much as you can, lipo the fat out all the time.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  I was just thinking, why can't our bodies be the power bank? And so at night, I'm like, oh, I gotta charge up my power bank. And I'm just like eating ice cream drizzled in olive oil and-

• 3:16Speaker 01

  I think I'm going to put this on the list. I'm going to put this on the list of alternatives for lithium ion batteries, which we're going to come to at the end. But, uh, the thing is, is that the energy density of this totally pathetic invention, I'm going hard, isn't even, isn't even anywhere close to the problems that it has. Um, maybe I'm overselling that slightly. I just don't like it. All right? And that's what this episode's about.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Our bodies are incredible machines, worrying away, making more and more DNA to build the proteins that keep us alive.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  In fact, in the last minute, your body has made over 200 million new cells and enough DNA to stretch to the moon and back.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  To the moon and back. That's so much DNA that if you compared it to the size of the cell it fits into, that would be like squeezing the London Underground into a suitcase.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  By the age of 50, you have copied almost six trillion miles of DNA. But every time that your body copies DNA, it risks making mistakes. And over time, those mistakes can accumulate and that collection of errors can lead to cancer.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  But incredibly, Cancer Research UK scientists can spot these errors. And by finding them, they've helped double UK cancer survival over the last 50 years and are driving even more discoveries that could tackle over 200 types of cancer.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/restiscience.

• 4:51Speaker 02

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• 5:22Speaker 03

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• 5:53Speaker 01

  You know that there's a bell in Oxford that has been ringing twice a second since 1840?

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, I did. But you can't really hear it.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  No, it's very quiet. I agree. But it's going, it's still going. Um, it's this battery that nobody has ever replaced. And the thing about this, right, this has been, this bell has been ringing, 1840, that's before the invention of the light bulb, before the invention of the electric light, an electric bell has been ringing nonstop continuously.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Can you describe this? Because I saw it a while ago, but it's, it is a very old, like one of the earliest batteries ever made, and it's running a bell, and it just keeps clanging the bell. And it's been clanging it since before the light bulb was invented.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Also, by the way, it's not going to run flat in our, in, in our lifetimes. It's got this little-

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Oh, we know that.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  This little four millimeter clapper on it that will physically wear out before the battery dies, right? The, the battery is going to outlive the bell that it, that it rings. This is this incredibly slow release of, of electricity that this dry pile, very old style battery, um, is, uh, is releasing. The thing about it, let me get a picture of it up for you. So people aren't completely sure exactly what's going on inside of it. So it sort of looks like, kind of looks a bit like two melted candles, really, that are, um, inside of this cloche, this glass cloche. And it, um, it has a, uh, sort of pendulum that swings between them. Um, and as it does so, it moves the charge from one

• 7:24Speaker 01

  side to the other. Essentially, it gets charged in one direction and charged in the other direction, going back and-

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Oh, so when the ball hits one of the bells, the charge gets switched to the other bell and then it-

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Exactly, right.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  I see. And I had never heard the word cloche. Cloche? Cloche?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Cloche.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Cloche. I'd never heard that before. I, I would call that a bell jar. Now, I just don't know, my vocab might be, might, might be limited. But yeah, it looks really, it looks really-

• 7:47Speaker 01

  It might be mine. It might be mine, Michael. I, I, the cloche is a thing where, you know, when you go to like really, really fancy dinners and they have like a metal bowl backwards, like upside down over your food.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Uh, no, when I go to fancy dinners, the crust of the pizza is stuffed.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  You need to hang out more with the king, Michael, okay?

• 8:07Speaker 00

  That's right. That's right. All right. Let them know I'm available.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  But I really like this idea. I really like this idea that actually, right at the earliest, earliest days, um, of, uh, people sort of playing around with electricity and trying to work out what it was doing, this sort of like novelty item was, was purchased and then ended up in, in this corridor at Oxford. But it's the slowest, the slowest fight that a battery has been basically ever made. And as we go through, we're gonna, we're gonna get through to the fastest release, um, that a battery has ever made, which is, which is, uh, the record held by lithium, uh, because boy, can it release stuff fast to when it wants to. Let me, let me go back in time a little bit because that, that was the 1840s that that particular bell was created. But actually, the, the story about

• 8:56Speaker 01

  batteries goes back a little bit further to the 1780s, uh, in Italy. And there was this guy, he's called Luigi Galvani. And he is, uh, messing around, like dissecting frogs. And what he does is he, um, he hangs these dead frogs on a railing and then he sees that they start kicking. And he's sort of like, he sort of has them, you know, maybe on some foil and there's like maybe some lemon juice around or he's, he's doing all these different experiments. But every now and then, even though these frogs are dead, he sees their legs starting to twitch. And so he's like, okay, well, look, well, I know what's going on here. Clearly, living creatures have this, this spark inside them, this, this animal electricity, right? That must be what's going on here. And he's got this friend,

• 9:41Speaker 01

  he's called Alessandro Volta. And Alessandro Volta is like, no, hon, I don't, I don't think that's what's going on at all. I think it's, I think it's the metal that's touching the frog leg. That's, there's something going on with the metals. It's just that the, the leg itself is just telling you there's electricity there. There's kind of nothing else going on. So what he does, I've got a demo for you. You ready?

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  What he does, plays around with loads of different, loads of different setups. And he comes up with this thing, this way to reliably create electricity. Hold on.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Oh, neat. You really do have a whole demo for us. Ooh, okay. I thought they were all coins. We've got-

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Look at this.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Some copper coins and some washers.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Yes, you do. Okay. So these are zinc washers, right? So basically, what this is, is sort of bluntly, the stuff you would find in, in your drawer downstairs, right? You've got some zinc washers, um, and some copper coins. Okay. And then I also here have some water that I have dissolved salt into.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  Okay, salt water.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Soaked saltwater, some brine, basically. I maybe frankly put in a bit too much salt, but that's fine. And then I've got these like little bits of cardboard that I've soaked in the brine.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Okay. So what he did, right? And he, there was a lot of experimentation for this, but essentially what he did is he, um- Started layering these things together.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Okay, so you have a piece of aluminum foil you've put down on your table. And then on top of that, you've put a zinc washer. On top of the zinc washer, you put a copper coin.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  And now I'm going to place a little bit of brine soaked cardboard on top.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  And then essentially you repeat this process, right? Because that is, that, those three together fundamentally all you need to create electricity, which feels insane to me, that these are just stuff that you would find in a drawer and you can use them to create electricity. However, it's not going to be bright enough to actually see it as electricity, unless I just create a few more. So hang on, that's not very good.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Can you tell me how this creates electricity? Or do you want to wait until you've built it?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  It turns out that what is happening here is that the salt water, the brine, is physically dissolving the zinc. It's like actually corroding it. And the way that it's doing that is that all of the zinc that's at the surface that's touching the brine, it releases two electrons and then the zinc ion escapes into the solution, right? Into, into the brine.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  So what happens is you have this little zinc atom that goes off in two different directions. Half of it, the ion, goes into the salt water. And the other part, the electrons, go up into the copper, which is sort of the easiest place for them to escape. So like you've kind of got this sandwich, right? So this sandwich, this bit of zinc is sandwiched between some salt water on the bottom, which is where the, uh, where the ion goes. And then a bit of metal on top, which is where the electrons go. So what you're doing is essentially like you are, you're, you're taking a single atom, you're breaking it apart, part of it's going one way, part of it's going the other. Now, no one really cares what direction the, that the ion itself is going in.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  But the electrons, electrons moving through a conductor. I mean, that's, that's literally electricity, right?

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  So if I continue with this right now, I really hope this is going to work. It did work when I tried it earlier, but I don't know whether, cross all your fingers and toes, okay? And if it doesn't work.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  So you've got the stack done and you've got, there's a zinc washer on the bottom, but there's a copper penny on the top.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Now hopefully, oh my gosh, if this works, Michael, I'm going to be so excited.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Okay, so now you have some wires attached to a little tiny light bulb.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  I do, a teeny, teeny tiny little LED. And I'm really hoping that this is going to light up.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  You're touching one wire to the very top copper coin and the other wire to the aluminum foil at the bottom.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  On the bottom. Oh no, it's not enough. Did you see it?

• 13:47Speaker 00

  No, I didn't. It's behind your hand.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  It worked, it worked, it worked, it worked, really?

• 13:52Speaker 00

  Oh, look at that. I can see that little flicker.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  You know what? I'm going to turn this, I'm going to turn my light off.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. So.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  There it is. It's like an orange, a reddish orange, very faint little ember, almost looking light, but it's coming from the LED.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Okay, so I'm off and now I'm on. I'm off and now I'm on. Come on.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  That is so cool.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Come on, that's the coolest thing.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  I didn't know it was so easy.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Junk from a drawer and I just made electricity.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Come on. I think that is absolutely amazing.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  What, what kind of LED was that? Like how, if I wanted to do this at home, what kind of LED do I need to get?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  It's an LED that I stole from my daughter's like, practice electricity, play with electricity kit. So it's just anything, anything. And the LED isn't even special, right? It's just, this is the, just the way that I know that there's electricity there. You could use a frog's leg if you want to. Anyway, I think that is.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Maybe nerdily, maybe I got too excited just because I was so worried it wouldn't work and then it did. But I think that's really phenomenal, that actually it really demonstrates how electricity is just this chemical reaction, right? It's just something that happens when you move electrons around. And that's literally all it is, right? That's, that's literally all it is.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so which way is the electricity flowing? Which way are the electrons flowing in your battery?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  So the electrons are going up because you have zinc and then copper on top. And the ions are going down.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Okay, the zinc ions go down, the electrons go up. Now, when they reached the top, there was a copper penny on top. Then why do they continue moving through the wire? Why aren't they happy to just stay on the top copper?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Because they carry on moving because now the bottom has got all of the ions on it and the ions are positively charged. So now you have like a charge differential between the top and the bottom. So the way that I like to think about batteries, right, is like, you know, let's say that you go to a concert with your friend and you go through the turnstile together. And then you're like, okay, I am going to go straight to my seat. And then your friend goes, okay, cool. You go straight to your seat. I'm going to go a lap of the stadium. I'm going to go buy some hot dogs. I'm going to like go and buy some beer and I'll come back and I'll meet you at this, the seat afterwards. That is literally all, that is literally all a battery is doing. You are the ion, the kind of like, the positive thing that's just going straight to the, to the end point.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  And the electron is going all the way around, going all the way around, all the way around, all around. And I'll meet you back at the seat. I'll meet you back afterwards, right? That's like, that's literally it. Yeah.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  The electron's doing a circuit, but it's going to come back to you.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  It's going to come back to you. Maybe, maybe, I mean, let's get technical here, right? Maybe it's not actually you. Maybe it's another identical version of you.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Fair enough. Yeah, they probably don't have friends, but they do have affinities for a kind.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yes. Let's imagine that it's, let's imagine it's you and me, Michael, right? We're, we're, we're off. I'll be the ion. You can be the electron. You go off and do all of the other work. And just by virtue of the fact that you're doing this enormous giant lap, you just happen to be going through a kettle, like, you know, like a light bulb in that instance. Whatever it might be, literally anything that you like, a computer, just by virtue of you traveling through it, that is electricity, right?

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Now, do we, do we know for sure that it's not personal? That it's not the electrons trying to get back to their original atom? I don't know how we would know, one way or the other. I guess you could like remove the zinc ions and replace it with some new zinc and then the electrons still want to get to the zinc that they can reach.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, excuse me.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Regardless of whether they used to know each other.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Where's my original buddy? Thank you.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Excuse me. I, I told, I told that zinc atom, that zinc nucleus that I was going to come back. I've been trying to get there and now I'm running a light bulb?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. I'll be back in a second. And but also don't forget, right, the speed that these electrons are moving at, it's, you know, the distance, the difference between kind of going down the pile and round is almost nothing, right?

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  So the way that the Volta did this, okay, I mean, this is like, I find this so crazy. This is in 1800, you guys, right? Like this is so early. And the way that he did it is he knew that there was a fish, a torpedo ray, a Mediterranean torpedo ray, and also the South American electric eel. He knew that they were able to create electricity because they could sort of sting their, their, their prey. He realized that inside these eels, they, they had basically a version of this. He was sort of copying it. They have these organs that are built of these, these like thousands of flat cells that are stacked like coins. And that's what he was trying to copy, right? It's like, okay, well, maybe this is like, he, in fact, he called this thing, the thing that I've just shown you, the artificial electric organ.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  And it's sort of kind of basically a forgery of biology that he was trying to, trying to create.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Right. I love that because today we think of electronic stuff as being counter to biology.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  However, in, in its inception, electricity was a thing that came from organs.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yes, completely. And then was also extremely closely linked to biology immediately afterwards. Because at this point, you know, Volta was like, okay, great, I've got this thing. But no one sort of, you didn't know what to do with it. And then Galvani, who, um, was the, you know, the guy with the frog's legs, he was like, okay, well, I think that there's, there's something here about sort of human flesh or, or dead flesh, biological matter, that kind of thing. And he was right in a way, incidentally, we should say, he was right because your nerves do run on electricity. Your nerves are moving charged ions around. I mean, the way your brain works is sort of squirty wet computer, as you've described it previously.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Um, anyway, so, so Galvani, his nephew, um, who is a guy called Giovanni Aldini, he knew all of this stuff was going on. He knew about Volta's battery. He knew about what his, his uncle had thoughts about, you know, flesh and electricity and stuff. So what he did is he wanted to see whether you could repeat the frog's leg trick with a dead human.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Right now.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  Mary Shelley.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  I'm gonna put a Mary Shelley, and Mary Shelley comes into this story in a moment. By the way, if you are sensitive of ears, sensitive of ears, I would just, I would just switch them off for a moment. I know a lot of people watch, listen to this program with their kids, so just, I'll try and put it in the most kid friendly way. Um, so this is like back in the days when obviously hangings were still, uh, an acceptable way to, to deal with criminals. So what happened was in 1803, uh, this is in London. There was a man called George Foster, who was, uh, convicted of drowning his wife in the Paddington Canal. And, uh, what they did is they, they managed to work out a way to, immediately after he was hung,

• 20:54Speaker 01

  to take his body and then subject it to a really big electrical current. And they didn't know what was gonna happen. They weren't sure whether maybe he would come alive, right? Maybe, maybe this would be, maybe he would sort of resurface. They genuinely had no idea what would happen. They connected up this battery, they had loads of people watching. And the jaw sort of started quivering, the muscles contorted, one eye opened. Um, the, the right fist started clenching and the legs started moving. Um, and everyone in the room was extremely freaked out, extremely freaked out by this. Um, there is, uh, one person who was there actually in an official capacity to witness what was going on.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  And well, the, the story goes that he was so horrified by what he'd seen that he, uh, died of shock that night. He'd sort of had watched.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Wait.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Like watched a corpse move and it had killed him.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Right, so they brought a corpse not to life, but to like faux life. And in the process, they actually created another corpse.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Apparently, there's one account that says that actually this, this particular guy, uh, Mr. Pass, the one who, who passed away. He, uh, had been the person who'd been responsible for getting, um, this, this hanged man to the experiment as quickly as possible, right? He was the one who had like dealt with the body. And yet even so, he, um, he was so horrified by, by what had been going on. They also, by the way, they had like a legal, um, disclaimer, I guess, on all of this. They were like, what if we do bring him back to life? What if, what do we do about his crime?

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Hang him again?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Well, luckily, luckily, I'm not sure that's the right word. Uh, his sentence was that he hang until he be dead. So there's no loophole there, there's no loophole for resurrection, right?

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Okay, so if he comes back, they still need to finish the sentence.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  They have to hang him again.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  They'd have to hang him again. Man, that, that would be so shocking because especially at that time, remind me, what year was this?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  1803.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  1803? Like, you're definitely gonna be thinking, okay, we can conquer death. This is Lazarus made real through the work of, of humans.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  Should we be doing this?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Should we be doing this? Can you imagine the crisis? The sort of like ethical, moral crisis that was going on in London around this time? Not a coincidence that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1816. I have heard actually different versions of this story that, um, there were these demonstrations with, with this kind of thing, right? Like using electricity in order to, to, to reignite bodies, human or otherwise. And that she had been in the audience at one of those demonstrations. I think it's all a little bit, it's all a little bit disputed and.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  A little apocryphal, yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  But what we can say for sure is that this was a big thing, a very big deal. And it was on the minds of the sort of learned classes in London, exactly this moment, that, that you potentially could bring creatures back to life. If only you had a battery big enough, right? Or, or kind of, um, strong enough.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  So it didn't, it didn't bring this man back.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Um, no.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  It, it maybe looked like he started moving again, but what was their immediate conclusion? If they had more power, could they do it? Or?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  I don't know, I don't, I, I honestly, I don't know, um, is the answer. One, one thing I will say is that you know the word galvanize?

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Okay, so this comes from Galvani. And the word means spurring someone to suddenly take action, right?

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Like electrocuting something into being almost.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  I know, I love that. I love also thinking of Volta and Galvani hanging out and being like, dude, our names, like, come on. Galvanize, volts, we're destined for this.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Voltage, come on, come on, we can do this, I know.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  A-historical.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  It's like, what is it called, nominative determinism? I do like the idea that they, uh, that, that the names existed before them and then they, they decided to live their lives accordingly to it.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Oh, I know, I know, it's, it's, I, I, there's a lot of little jokes like that. Oh, it reminds me of the one where it's like Jesus is hanging out with Judas and Judas is like, oh, I gotta go, man. But I'll, I'll see you at the Last Supper? And Jesus is like, at the what? And Judas goes, oh, I mean, but just the regular supper.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  I like that. I like that a lot. That's a really good joke. That's very good. Okay, here is, um, here's the thing, okay? So, so all of this is like the kind of Western version of the story, that, that all of these big breakthroughs were being made in the 1800s. There is another version of this story that actually humans had batteries way earlier, way, way, way earlier.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Oh, of course.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Because, do you know about this already?

• 26:01Speaker 00

  No, but I'm just thinking, I just saw you make a battery that could have been made much earlier than 1800.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  In Baghdad, right, in Iraq, in, in 1936. They found this 2,000 year old jar. And within the jar, there was a copper cylinder with an iron rod inside it.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  And basically, it's the same thing as this.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Right, so you could fill it with like seawater and you'd have an ancient battery.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  An ancient battery, exactly. Okay, so it's about 14 centimeters tall, right? A bit smaller than a pint glass, basically. And the, the cylinder inside it is like rolled up copper and down the middle, not touching is, is, is the iron rod. And, um, any sort of acidic liquid in there, I mean, it's, it's exactly a Galvanic cell. It's, it's, it's exactly what I've just made.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Do we know what they would have done with it?

• 26:58Speaker 01

  I should probably add here that there are some other archaeologists who think that the whole thing is nonsense. And actually, it had nothing to do with electricity whatsoever. And, uh, actually, it was just a pot. It was just a pot that people were putting stuff in. But if it had been, you know, set up properly, you could get 1.4 volts from it, which is about one AA battery.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Which is pretty, pretty good. So everyone got very excited and were like, maybe they were, I don't know, like using it to plate jewelry, okay? You know, like to sort of electrocute different types of jewelry and maybe they were, um, I don't know.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Charging their iPad.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Maybe they were, maybe they were. I mean, they had tablets, right? Is it that much of a stretch?

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, good one.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Right, totally. Cause I think that's the thing about the, my, I just put my fingers in my mouth, they're so salty from that brine.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Oh, mm, salted cardboard.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Salted cardboard. But, but I think this is the thing actually, which is what makes the, what Volta and Galvani were doing really interesting at that particular moment. Because almost certainly other humans came across this, almost certainly. That at some point in history, two different metals and something like saltwater were, were connected to each other and had this sort of strange chemistry. But it's the fact that they didn't just spot it. They worked out how the electricity could be used. And then other people like Faraday came along and really took that and ran with it. And I mean, you know, this, I, I really do think that, that, that the sort of discovery of electricity is.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  By quite a long stretch, the thing that has changed the world more than any other invention, perhaps since, you know, fire, right? It's phenomenal, the thing that it's done. One thing that's kind of sad about that, the ancient battery, the 2,000 year old battery, is that there were fragments of it that were in Iraq's museum until 2003, and then in the war, they vanished. The relics of it are now gone, which is really sad, I think.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  That's really sad. I mean, and that's a huge problem. When war comes to these important archaeological areas or artifacts, they can just be lost. And it's such a shame because they stayed around for thousands of years and then we lose them? I'm going to use this as an opportunity to ask if anyone can help me get a deck of archaeological awareness playing cards. Please reach out to us, [email protected]. Hannah, you've probably seen the Iraq War playing cards, like the most wanted playing cards that soldiers got, and it was like Saddam Hussein was the ace of spades.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  And, okay, well, later, when it became really apparent that action in the Middle East was putting in jeopardy important archaeological artifacts, a deck of cards was put together that didn't have all of the most wanted people on it. Instead, it had the most important archaeological treasures in the region so that soldiers would become familiar with them and they would know, they would recognize, ah, wait, that's not just some recent thing built, that is important and we need to protect that. And the whole vibe of the deck is the importance of history, that this is not Iraqi history,

• 30:32Speaker 00

  this is human history, this is your history. And to win hearts and minds and to do the right thing for the past and the future and now, protect them. It's like the opposite of if you see this guy, capture him. It was if you see this, protect it. And you can buy the most wanted Iraqi leaders' decks on Amazon, but I don't know how to get one of these archaeological awareness ones, but they look incredible.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  That is, did it work? Did any artifacts get sort of saved by virtue of the fact that there were this deck of cards?

• 31:06Speaker 00

  I haven't heard about if it worked. I know that it wasn't perfect because we continue to lose important pieces of our past, irrevocably.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  I like that idea, though. I really like that idea.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think the different suits were different things. Like, one was landmarks, like large things, another was small objects, and one suit was just like, why history is important. Each card was a reminder of like, why this matters. And I've only been able to see a few of the cards because, again, like, a full deck is just not there online anywhere.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. They found, oh, look, I think that, actually, while we've been talking, our wonderful producers have found a deck.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh! How did you guys find this? Oh, this is so beautiful. It's full of history, but I really love the cards that are about the importance of history. Yeah, I mean, look at the five of spades. It just says, "A looted archaeological site means the details of our common past are lost forever."

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Wow, there's one here. "This site has survived for 17 centuries. Will it and others survive you?"

• 32:13Speaker 00

  I know! And, you know, this also has some information about who made the cards on one of them, so that might help, too. They've got a picture, the Jack of Diamonds has the Statue of Liberty on it, and it says, "How would we feel if someone destroyed her torch?"

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Always wanted to go to Iraq. Always wanted. The history there is so phenomenal.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  It's so phenomenal and it's so deep. It is so ancient.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Amazing mathematicians as well, incredible mathematicians.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  But we lost the fragments we had of this ancient battery.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Let me bring it back to my arch nemesis for the purposes of this discussion, lithium. Because the point here is that, actually, we're not sort of stuck with lithium, right? You can make batteries from all different kinds of things, you know, just from salt water. Now, on the list of energy-dense things, okay, it's important for me to add that salt water, that little concoction that I did there, it's way worse than anything in the room, including lithium battery. But the sort of the history of this idea, right, that you start off with like brine and things, it took till 1859 before Gaston Plantey created the first ever rechargeable battery.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  So the idea with the rechargeable battery is then you put energy into it, you take the two friends who are seated and you return them to the turnstile. You sort of put them outside of the stadium again.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Now, does that mean that, could you recharge that pile that you made? Could you like, get the zinc to go back, gain, you put electrons back on the atoms and?

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Not easily, because this one is literally about kind of corroding the metal.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  It corrodes and it's, yeah.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Well, also, on that topic, what do we call it when you coat something in a protective layer of zinc?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Galvanize.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  Galvanized.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Galvanize, baby.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  Galvini! Thank you!

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Thank you for your dead frog's legs. Okay, so the thing is, is that this first rechargeable battery, it was lead and acid, but it was like, rolled in a spiral. He didn't patent it, he just apparently spent most of his fortune helping broke scientists. He was sort of a good do, this guy. Anyway, a bit later, 1866, there's a zinc-carbon cell that's sort of the ancestor of the AA battery. Then you had Edison. Edison was quite particular, by the way. He didn't like the lead batteries, he wanted nickel. He also, incidentally, Edison was like, really into electric cars. He was like, really wanted electric cars to work. In fact, I have driven Edison's electric car, the one that he owned.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  With an acid battery?

• 34:58Speaker 01

  I think technically it was an alkaline, but yes, basically, in the front and in the back and everywhere, because they were massive.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Ooh!

• 35:06Speaker 01

  And a tilster steering, it was a very fun day out. The problem is, right, that the reason why the electric thing didn't work out is purely because of the energy density, because petrol is so, so, so, so much more energy dense. You could have a giant battery, right? Gigantic, and it would be the equivalent of having like a thimble's worth of petrol.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  It's just, you know, forget it, you're not getting anywhere. And then in 1980, in Oxford, there was a guy called John Goodenough, which I think is the perfect name for this.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  How was it spelled?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Literally Good Enough.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  Good Enough, one word, that's your last name.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  One word, yeah. And what he gave us was essentially the lithium battery, which is, sure, it's good enough for now, John Goodenough, thank you. It is good enough for now, but he worked out a way.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  Talk about Apple named people. Volta, obviously that was a joke because the Volt was named later on, but Good Enough.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Good enough, exactly.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  The Good Enough battery.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Good Enough battery. He was the one, really, who sort of set the stage. So, okay, I'll tell you what, we'll go for a break now, and then, Good Enough has got Nobel Prize, by the way.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Oh, that's good enough.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Imagine being his friend, it would be, it would be constant torture, wouldn't it? Constant torture not to just make the same joke all the time. All right, let's go for a break, and then when we come back, I'm going to tell you why lithium batteries are absolute rubbish.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  Okay, I can't wait.

• 36:53Speaker 00

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• 36:56Speaker 01

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• 38:56Speaker 01

  Okay, we come to lithium. What do you know about lithium?

• 39:00Speaker 00

  I know it's a metal. I know that its atoms only have three electrons around them. I know it has some medical uses for mood.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  And

• 39:17Speaker 01

  It's also a bit of a drama queen, isn't it? A bit of a drama queen.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  I did not know that about it. I knew that it's the name of a Nirvana song.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Have you ever put it near any water?

• 39:27Speaker 00

  Oh, oh, yeah, it's in that family of things like sodium and potassium. You put it in water. A lot of hydrogen gas is made, a lot of heat, big flame explosion.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, come on, this is like, this is the planet of water. You're going to explode in the presence of, come on.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Like, give it a, give it a rest, guys.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Calm down. It's not about you.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Hello.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  It's very sort of pick me energy, isn't it?

• 39:52Speaker 00

  Now I know it's a drama queen too. It wouldn't seem from the right perspective. But I also know that it is part of a lithium ion battery, but I don't know how they work at all.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Okay, so I mean, basically, it's doing the same thing as, as the Galvani battery, the Volta battery that I showed you earlier, which is that you have this little atom of lithium. And because it's a drama queen, it will just chuck away its electrons at the slightest, the slightest nudge. It doesn't care. It's very impatient. So I'm just not interested. So you have them, you have a lithium particle, lithium atom, going through the turnstile. You can be, you can be the lithium atom. Oh, no, wait, which way around did we do it? I'll be the lithium atom. I'll be the drama queen. That's fine. You can be the electrons, right? So you go through the turnstile and then exactly the same way as before.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  The process is set up where the electrons go all the way around the stadium, all the way around, get the hot dogs and so on. And the ion goes straight to the seat and then they sort of meet up at the end. And the reason why lithium works, right, lithium ion, sort of, you're saying you're stripping the electrons from the lithium. The reason why it works is because it is such a drama queen, because it will just give up its electrons so easily. That's sort of the reason why it ends up being used. It is because it is so reactive that it ends up being a good one.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Okay, so more so than zinc or iron, it gives up these electrons like, like more quickly or more, more with, with less of a nudge.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, they have, it's got the lowest electrode potential of any common chemistry. So it gives you the highest voltage, basically.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  In terms of its energy density, it's about three times more energy dense than the batteries that it replaced. Okay, it's like, it's a genuine improvement on what went before.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  But still absolute rubbish compared to butter. So there's this huge design flaw with them, which is that there is this liquid inside there that is incredibly flammable. So if a battery gets damaged, if it gets like, you know, knocked, or if it overheats, or if it's charged incorrectly, it can catch fire and then the heat can sort of spread to other parts of the battery. You end up with this sort of chain reaction. It's just, it's, I would say, bad. This failure that can happen, it makes it genuinely dangerous, right? It's called thermal runaway, runaway. And it's where you get essentially a slow motion explosion that's, that gets let off the leash, right?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  The problem is also if you have a fire, a lithium battery fire, you can't smother it because as the cathode itself starts to break down, it releases oxygen.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Oh, so it's self-oxygenating.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  From the inside.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  From the inside, so you can't just cover it in sand. You can't just spray water on it because

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Because you know what happens with lithium?

• 42:55Speaker 01

  It's incredibly difficult to put out these fires. So Tesla's own firefighter guide, right, says that a battery fire can need 3,000 gallons of water and take up to 24 hours, right? One, one Texas crew apparently used 28,000 gallons of water to put out a single car, which is a month's worth of their water, over seven hours.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  Okay, so you can, you can use water, but what is it just that the amount of heat released is so high, you just need more and more water to keep it?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  I mean, these are burning past like a thousand degrees centigrade. Okay. And like, it's extreme. Also, by the way, you can leave them and then they can reignite days later. And I think this is it, you know, you saw, you have all of these, you've got so much of it in your house right now. It's everywhere. And you're sort of, oh, damaged electrical goods, whatever, who get, no, it's lithium. It's like extreme drama queen, like mega, mega drama queen. And, you know, I think that there's a better, I think there's, I think there's better options.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Okay, what are, what are they?

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Okay, so I think that there are options. There aren't any clear options yet, but I think there are options. The main thing is like, this is one of the reasons why I'm really excited about quantum computing and this new era of AI, which is exploring material science. So there's these new startups that are popping up all over the place that are going to try and do to material science, what things like Alpha Fold have done for biology, right? Which is like completely revolutionized the space. And the kind of gold star, North Star, whatever the phrases those tech bros use. The thing that like people really, really, really want is a better battery, one that is more stable, one that is more energy dense.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  One that, yeah, can cram in more energy, is faster to charge. Just, you know, all of the above, that doesn't require you the insane sort of mining that you need to, to, to get lithium. The one that isn't kind of certainly dominated by one particular country. It's like, it's a real thing that people are like really, really

• 45:09Speaker 00

  And that would be a huge game changer, not just because like our phone batteries would last longer. But if the batteries were lighter too, then suddenly electric cargo trucking becomes much more feasible. Gosh, even like a space elevator becomes, you know, something that

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Your, your great dream.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  My great dream.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Your great dream. I mean, there's also an incredible amount of energy is lost in that process of taking the two from the seats and then putting them back outside of the turnstiles, right? Like, that's an inefficient process of like recharging the battery. You don't get out of it what you put in. So even if you, I mean, let's imagine that you, you kind of made a battery that was twice as efficient or 10 times as efficient or like, let's go crazy. As sort of body fat is 40 times as, as good as, as lithium. So maybe, you know, like, let's go crazy. I'm sort of mixing different measurements here, but just go with me for a second. You, you need to even make the smallest marginal difference improvement to lithium battery to completely change the world.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  And I think here's the thing, actually, we don't have a shortage of energy on this planet. There is no shortage of energy. There is plenty of solar energy. There is plenty of wind energy. There is plenty, plenty, plenty of renewable sources. Getting that and collecting it is not the problem. The problem is storing it. The problem is storing it and moving it to the right places that need it at the right time. And if you can crack that problem, I mean,

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Changes the world. Yeah. So we need like little digestive systems in our devices that we can feed butter to.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  But then our devices are gonna poop.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Then our devices are gonna poop. I would take a bit of poop, would I? If your phone was like, it's time for me to go for a poop, maybe I would.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah, if it meant that like an electric car could be lighter, if it meant that I only needed to feed my phone like every, you know, once a month, but I had to deal with some cyborg feces, I don't know.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Maybe petrol stations could turn into poop stations.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah. Little flush zones for your electronic energy waste.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Hey, why not? Right. I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you some of the, because there are a few alternatives that are out there, right?

• 47:33Speaker 00

  Okay, oh yeah, tell me about the real alternatives.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  None of them are quite like, you know, there, yeah, but, okay, so you can make sodium batteries, which is like also in the same part of the pyrolytic table as lithium.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Family, yeah.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  And they are, it's sort of, they're bigger, they're, they're cheaper. They are harder to set on fire, which I would say is, is a good thing. But key thing is that sodium, you can get it out of common salt, you know, there's plenty of sodium around.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Don't have to mine it from special areas. Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. Other options are some like quite weird ones, which I like. So some people are experimenting with this thing called liquid air, which is where you take ordinary air and when you have an abundance of energy, so I don't know, like loads of solar power or whatever it might be, you take ordinary air and you freeze it to minus 196 degrees centigrade.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  So it's all liquid?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  All liquid.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  And that's, that's gonna be a mixture of liquid oxygen, nitrogen.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  A little bit of carbon dioxide. Yeah.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. So now this thing is like this pale blue liquid, one seven hundredth of its original volume, by the way. And then you park it in an insulated tank and you sort of, you know, leave it down, hold its charge for like, hold its charge in investor comments, for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. What you do is when the grid runs short, you bring it up, let it, let it go warm. It sort of flashes back into a gas. You can use that to drive a turbine back to electricity straight away.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. I don't know why I never even thought of that. I, I've read so much about like molten salt as a way to store energy. But like liquefied air, the emission is air.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Is air, which is fine. It's absolutely cool. Yeah. Other options, there's some people who are experimenting with making batteries out of rust. So where you, I mean, it's sort of the most boring metallic process there is where you just, you let iron rust. And then, which pulls oxygen from the air to make iron oxide essentially. And then you can unrust it by kind of taking the oxygen out again, right? So it's, you have to be quite patient for this one to work. But it is sort of a way to, I mean, if you're thinking of energy as like this chemical process, any reversible chemical process can sort of be used as a battery in a way.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh yeah, right. And the question then is, can we make it small enough? Like, sure, air, when it's frozen, is compressed really small, but that can't go in here. It's gonna be really cold. And then that would be funny if my phone was just constantly emitting air in a gas state. It'd be better than, than pooping, but it would be farting.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  So now we've got farting phones.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. Farting with a P H. Get it? Phone farting? Look, I'm the marketing guy. Reach out to me. I'll tell you what to call it.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  But yeah, I mean, this, I guess I all I've got is to sort of summarize, you've got what you're holding in your hand right there is basically like a controlled, a very carefully caged explosion.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's dangerous. And I think it's fascinating to me that we've had to make some concessions. Like, you can't bring a bunch of extra lithium ion batteries onto an airplane, but you can bring your phone, not because it's safer, but because like, people need their phones. So we just have to take that risk.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Can you imagine? Sorry. Can you just imagine like before, you know, back in like the seventies, being like, oh, hi, yeah, I, I just wanna, I just wanna drum around with this little bag of lithium with me at all times?

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Would that be okay? You know, is that all right? But this is it, you know, when, if you, if you like, drop your phone, or like, it gets ground or whatever, and you break that lattice?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Don't, don't.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  Don't. That's what happens. Don't.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Don't. Yeah. So there you go. That's, that's, that's the thing that I'm really hoping for in the future is that lithium's thing of the past.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  That's gonna be cool. Yeah. And whatever comes next will be, will be so much better. Not just, not just safer, but, but better as a energy source for charging, for energy release. It's gonna be different. Yeah, I think, I think we'll look back at, you know, photos from this time when people are like carrying around phone chargers and they're plugged into walls and we're gonna go, oh, man, remember when you had to charge stuff all the time?

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Was it Edison who wanted there to be sort of wireless charging around the entire world? I think he did.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  I don't remember who it was, but yeah, I think we'll get there at some point. Like, why can't the radio stations just be charging my phone?

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Maybe they should. Maybe they should. Or it was Tesla, apparently. Apparently.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  Ah, classic Edison Tesla mixer switcheroo.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  And there you go. Instead of that, instead, he lends his name to a car that burns a thousand degrees, takes a month's worth of water to put out.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  He could lend his name to a car that doesn't.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  That doesn't. Exactly right. There is one final type of battery, actually, that I think holds some real promise. If the first battery was inspired by an eel, an electric eel that Volta had dissected, there's some really new work. This is like 2025, a group at Penn State, who are stacking hydrogels, right? It's a sort of eel architecture, basically, trying to copy what eels are doing. The idea is that you can use them in pacemakers and implants, and they can run off the body's own ions. So you have all of the stuff going on in your body already, all of this sort of electrical signals.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Is there a way that you can sort of create a battery that taps into that? Yeah. Because you do not want to put a lithium battery inside a human.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  No, no, you don't. But I'll be a battery if I need to be.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Hey, we'll plug you in.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  Speaking of bodies providing energy, you all energize us. Thank you for watching. Thank you for subscribing to us on YouTube, following us on whatever podcast platform you use.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Just, just, just, just before we go, what's quite nice is because you're in New Zealand, I'm in London, we're basically antipodes from one another. The sun left me as it arrived for you. Look, I'm now in the dark.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  I've got your sun now.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  You've got my sun.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Look at that. I love it. You look like a Rembrandt painting, and I'm over here just looking like some guy on a nineties camcorder.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  But you know, it's the odd couple.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  As always, you can reach out to us at the rest is science at goalhanger.com. And if you would like to subscribe, you can do that here on YouTube or follow us wherever you're listening to us. You can do it right now.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  We will see you next time. Thank you.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

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  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

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