Damn Interesting has a piece up about nanobatteries (with a clever ending, ha ha ha) that concludes they are “still too expensive or impractical to be put to everyday use.”

Here’s another interesting development in battery design (Wall Street Journal article so subscription required):

Dr. [Angela] Belcher, a materials scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, heads a team that has successfully created a battery assembled by a benign biological virus that binds to gold and cobalt oxide.

The new material “has three times the electricity-generating capacity of traditional battery materials of the same size” and will enable batteries smaller than hearing aid batteries.

But that’s not all. Get a load of this:

Besides high power, the technology promises batteries that are flexible and transparent. That raises the possibility that a small portable video screen — such as the one on a cellphone — could be coated with the viral-battery material instead of being attached to a separate battery. Other applications might involve medical use such as battery power for tiny devices threaded through arteries.

A tiny, clear battery. Just don’t drop it.

Or mix it up with your contacts.

Here’s the MIT press release on the new battery material.