China Develops Supercharged Battery.

Scientists at a big research place in China called the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) have made a super cool new material that could change batteries forever! This material is a solid electrolyte made with sulfide, and it’s really good at letting electricity flow through it—better than anything like it before.

This discovery might help make all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries (ASSBs for short) something we can use all the time. Those are batteries that could make things like electric cars and phones work even better and safer. Regular batteries use a liquid inside them, but ASSBs use a solid instead, which could hold more power and not catch fire as easily. The problem was that the solid stuff they tried before wasn’t great at moving electricity or staying strong.

The team, led by two smart professors named Wu Zhongshuai and Shi Haodong, made this new material called LGSSSI (it’s a mouthful, but it stands for something with lithium, germanium, silicon, antimony, sulfur, and iodine). They mixed in different ingredients in a special way to make it awesome. It’s so good that electricity moves through it super easily, with something called a low “activation energy” of just 0.17 eV (that’s a science way of saying it doesn’t take much effort for the power to flow).

When they squished it cold, it could move electricity at 12.7 mS/cm, and when they squished it hot, it got even better—32.2 mS/cm! That’s way faster than the usual 10 mS/cm that most batteries need to work well at room temperature. This could be a game-changer!

Professor Wu said this could help make batteries that work in hot or cold weather, hold a lot of power, and last a super long time. Pretty cool, right?