Apple and Google just announced new tablets and smartphones touting the latest technological advances, but one thing those devices can't brag is a battery made with portobello mushrooms. According to new research from engineers at the University of California at Riverside, however, future gadgets might. 
 
 In a paper published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports on Tuesday, researchers from the university's Bourns College of Engineering describe how they created a new type of high-carbon lithium ion battery component using heat-treated nanoribbons from the skins of portobello mushrooms. 
 
 They did that in an attempt to replace synthetic graphite as the current industry standard for anodes, or positive terminals. Synthetic graphite has a high manufacturing cost because it requires significant chemical preparation and activation, researcher Mihri Ozkan told UCR Today. Moreover, the preparation process uses a series of acids and bases that are harmful to the environment, so researchers from a number of institutions are searching for alternatives that are inexpensive, easy to produce and environmentally friendly. 
 
 Beau Lark/Corbis 
 
 Portobello mushrooms are an ideal candidate to replace synthetic graphite for a multitude of reasons, the researchers say. The mushrooms become just the right kind of porous when heated to about 1,100 degrees Celsius (2,012 degrees Fahrenheit), giving them much more space for liquid and air to pass through. This heat-treatment creates more room for the storage and transfer of energy and, theoretically, better batteries. 
 
 Perhaps more importantly, portobello mushrooms are high in potassium salt, which makes the pores more accessible to the electrolytes in the battery with each charge and discharge cycle, which could actually increase the battery's capacity over time. So instead of a battery that degrades with each cycle and requires more frequent recharges, mushroom batteries might actually get better with age. 
 
 Mushroom lithium ion batteries aren't going to replace traditional batteries anytime soon, as the researchers say the technology needs more optimization before such biological anodes can replace the standard synthetic graphite ones. But the paper shows that batteries made out of organic biological materials that are cheap, environmentally friendly and easy to produce are feasible. 
 
 You can learn more about the team's research by reading the article in full on the journal Nature Scientific Reports' online site here. Now, all we need are some batteries made out of olives and green peppers and we'll have one truly powerful pizza combination. ||||| Porous structure of portabella mushrooms is key to making efficient batteries that could power cell phones and electric vehicles 
 
 RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Can portabella mushrooms stop cell phone batteries from degrading over time? 
 
 Researchers at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering think so. 
 
 They have created a new type of lithium-ion battery anode using portabella mushrooms, which are inexpensive, environmentally friendly and easy to produce. The current industry standard for rechargeable lithium-ion battery anodes is synthetic graphite, which comes with a high cost of manufacturing because it requires tedious purification and preparation processes that are also harmful to the environment. 
 
 With the anticipated increase in batteries needed for electric vehicles and electronics, a cheaper and sustainable source to replace graphite is needed. Using biomass, a biological material from living or recently living organisms, as a replacement for graphite, has drawn recent attention because of its high carbon content, low cost and environmental friendliness. 
 
 UC Riverside engineers were drawn to using mushrooms as a form of biomass because past research has established they are highly porous, meaning they have a lot of small spaces for liquid or air to pass through. That porosity is important for batteries because it creates more space for the storage and transfer of energy, a critical component to improving battery performance. 
 
 In addition, the high potassium salt concentration in mushrooms allows for increased electrolyte-active material over time by activating more pores, gradually increasing its capacity. 
 
 A conventional anode allows lithium to fully access most of the material during the first few cycles and capacity fades from electrode damage occurs from that point on. The mushroom carbon anode technology could, with optimization, replace graphite anodes. It also provides a binderless and current-collector free approach to anode fabrication. 
 
 "With battery materials like this, future cell phones may see an increase in run time after many uses, rather than a decrease, due to apparent activation of blind pores within the carbon architectures as the cell charges and discharges over time," said Brennan Campbell, a graduate student in the Materials Science and Engineering program at UC Riverside. 
 
 The research findings were outlined in a paper, "Bio-Derived, Binderless, Hierarchically Porous Carbon Anodes for Li-ion Batteries," published today (Sept. 29) in the journal Scientific Reports. It was authored by Cengiz Ozkan and Mihri Ozkan, both professors in the Bourns College of Engineering, and three of their current or former graduate students: Campbell, Robert Ionescu and Zachary Favors. 
 
 Nanocarbon architectures derived from biological materials such as mushrooms can be considered a green and sustainable alternative to graphite-based anodes, said Cengiz Ozkan, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering. 
 
 The nano-ribbon-like architectures transform upon heat treatment into an interconnected porous network architecture which is important for battery electrodes because such architectures possess a very large surface area for the storage of energy, a critical component to improving battery performance. 
 
 One of the problems with conventional carbons, such as graphite, is that they are typically prepared with chemicals such as acids and activated by bases that are not environmentally friendly, said Mihri Ozkan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Therefore, the UC Riverside team is focused on naturally-derived carbons, such as the skin of the caps of portabella mushrooms, for making batteries. 
 
 It is expected that nearly 900,000 tons of natural raw graphite would be needed for anode fabrication for nearly six million electric vehicle forecast to be built by 2020. This requires that the graphite be treated with harsh chemicals, including hydrofluoric and sulfuric acids, a process that creates large quantities of hazardous waste. The European Union projects this process will be unsustainable in the future. 
 
 The Ozkan's research is supported by the University of California, Riverside. 
 
 This paper involving mushrooms is published just over a year after the Ozkan's labs developed a lithium-ion battery anode based on nanosilicon via beach sand as the natural raw material. Ozkan's team is currently working on the development of pouch prototype batteries based on nanosilicon anodes. 
 
 The UCR Office of Technology Commercialization has filed patents for the inventions above. 
 
 ### ||||| See video here. April 6, 2015 Aluminum battery from Stanford offers safe alternative to conventional batteries The new aluminum-ion battery could replace many of the lithium-ion and alkaline batteries in wide use today. By Mark Shwartz Stanford postdoc Yingpen Wu and colleagues have developed the first rechargeable aluminum-ion battery that's inexpensive, long-lasting and safe. (Mark Shwartz / Precourt Institute for Energy) Stanford University scientists have invented the first high-performance aluminum battery that's fast-charging, long-lasting and inexpensive. Researchers say the new technology offers a safe alternative to many commercial batteries in wide use today. "We have developed a rechargeable aluminum battery that may replace existing storage devices, such as alkaline batteries, which are bad for the environment, and lithium-ion batteries, which occasionally burst into flames," said Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford. "Our new battery won't catch fire, even if you drill through it." Dai and his colleagues describe their novel aluminum-ion battery in "An ultrafast rechargeable aluminum-ion battery," which will be published in the April 6 advance online edition of the journal Nature. 
 
 Aluminum has long been an attractive material for batteries, mainly because of its low cost, low flammability and high-charge storage capacity. For decades, researchers have tried unsuccessfully to develop a commercially viable aluminum-ion battery. A key challenge has been finding materials capable of producing sufficient voltage after repeated cycles of charging and discharging. Graphite cathode An aluminum-ion battery consists of two electrodes: a negatively charged anode made of aluminum and a positively charged cathode. "People have tried different kinds of materials for the cathode," Dai said. "We accidentally discovered that a simple solution is to use graphite, which is basically carbon. In our study, we identified a few types of graphite material that give us very good performance." For the experimental battery, the Stanford team placed the aluminum anode and graphite cathode, along with an ionic liquid electrolyte, inside a flexible polymer- coated pouch. "The electrolyte is basically a salt that's liquid at room temperature, so it's very safe," said Stanford graduate student Ming Gong, co-lead author of the Nature study. Aluminum batteries are safer than conventional lithium-ion batteries used in millions of laptops and cell phones today, Dai added. "Lithium-ion batteries can be a fire hazard," he said. As an example, he pointed to recent decisions by United and Delta airlines to ban bulk lithium-battery shipments on passenger planes. "In our study, we have videos showing that you can drill through the aluminum battery pouch, and it will continue working for a while longer without catching fire," Dai said. "But lithium batteries can go off in an unpredictable manner – in the air, the car or in your pocket. Besides safety, we have achieved major breakthroughs in aluminum battery performance." One example is ultra-fast charging. Smartphone owners know that it can take hours to charge a lithium-ion battery. But the Stanford team reported "unprecedented charging times" of down to one minute with the aluminum prototype. Durability is another important factor. Aluminum batteries developed at other laboratories usually died after just 100 charge-discharge cycles. But the Stanford battery was able to withstand more than 7,500 cycles without any loss of capacity. "This was the first time an ultra-fast aluminum-ion battery was constructed with stability over thousands of cycles," the authors wrote. By comparison, a typical lithium-ion battery lasts about 1,000 cycles. "Another feature of the aluminum battery is flexibility," Gong said. "You can bend it and fold it, so it has the potential for use in flexible electronic devices. Aluminum is also a cheaper metal than lithium." Applications In addition to small electronic devices, aluminum batteries could be used to store renewable energy on the electrical grid, Dai said. "The grid needs a battery with a long cycle life that can rapidly store and release energy," he explained. "Our latest unpublished data suggest that an aluminum battery can be recharged tens of thousands of times. It's hard to imagine building a huge lithium-ion battery for grid storage." Aluminum-ion technology also offers an environmentally friendly alternative to disposable alkaline batteries, Dai said. "Millions of consumers use 1.5-volt AA and AAA batteries," he said. "Our rechargeable aluminum battery generates about two volts of electricity. That's higher than anyone has achieved with aluminum." But more improvements will be needed to match the voltage of lithium-ion batteries, Dai added. "Our battery produces about half the voltage of a typical lithium battery," he said. "But improving the cathode material could eventually increase the voltage and energy density. Otherwise, our battery has everything else you'd dream that a battery should have: inexpensive electrodes, good safety, high-speed charging, flexibility and long cycle life. I see this as a new battery in its early days. It's quite exciting." Other co-lead authors of the study affiliated with Stanford are visiting scientists Meng-Chang Lin from the Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute, Bingan Lu from Hunan University, and postdoctoral scholar Yingpeng Wu. Other authors are Di-Yan Wang, Mingyun Guan, Michael Angell, Changxin Chen and Jiang Yang from Stanford; and Bing-Joe Hwang from National Taiwan Normal University. Principal support for the research was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute, the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project, the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy and the Taiwan Ministry of Education. For more Stanford experts on chemistry and other topics, visit Stanford Experts. -30- ||||| We’re one step closer to biodegradable gadgets. These computer chips are made almost entirely out of wood. 
 
 Scientists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison teamed up with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Products Laboratory to fashion the new semiconductor chip. The paper was published today in Nature Communications. 
 
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 See, most of a computer chip is composed of a “support” layer that cradles the actual chip. The research team replaced that support layer’s non-biodegradable material with something called cellulose nanofibril (CNF), which is flexible, wood-based, biodegradable—all things that can make a device way less hazardous. 
 
 “Now the chips are so safe you can put them in the forest and fungus will degrade it,” says Professor Zhenqiang Ma, who led the team. “They become as safe as fertilizer.” 
 
 A possible roadblock was the fact that wood can expand or shrink based on how much moisture it sucks in from the air. The fix? Glaze the CNF film with an epoxy coating, a substance that makes CNF more resistant to water. In addition to wicking away moisture, the coating also made the CNF smoother. 
 
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 The result: a sustainable “green chip” that’s cheaper and less toxic than the materials currently used in electronics. Every little bit helps when we’re piling landfills with thrown out phones, especially when dangerous chemicals in existing computer chips, like gallium arsenide, can leak into the ground. Perhaps this new technology could lead to, say, entire phones being made out of wood-based materials, creating a landscape of responsible electronic devices. 
 
 Most phones, tablets, and other portable gizmos are made out of stuff that isn’t biodegradable and is toxic to the environment. Plus, gadgets go obsolete so quickly, prompting folks to rapidly chuck older versions. But using a wood-based material to build the bulk of a computer chip could lead to less harmful devices in the future. 
 
 [ScienceDaily] 
 
 
 
 Image credit: University of Wisconsin
– It isn't happening just yet, but a new scientific paper shows that it's possible, and perhaps even advantageous, to make batteries out of organic biological materials that have the added benefit of being cheap, environmentally friendly, and easy to produce, reports CNET. Engineers at the University of California, Riverside, report in the journal Scientific Reports that they've developed a new kind of lithium-ion battery anode that uses portobello mushrooms, which turn out to be so efficient (thanks largely to their porousness) that they could even replace the industry standard of synthetic graphite. The development could affect multiple industries, reports Discovery, which notes that biological materials might enable us to bring down costs and expend less energy in manufacturing, while synthetic graphite demands specific preparation and purification processes that are not only more costly but less environmentally friendly. The mushroom carbon anode tech could ultimately replace graphite anodes, the team reports in a press release: "With battery materials like this, future cell phones may see an increase in run time after many uses, rather than a decrease, due to apparent activation of blind pores within the carbon architectures as the cell charges and discharges over time," says one researcher. (Check out why some mushrooms glow in the dark.)