When pushed into the smallest of cracks, water can be utilized in surprising methods. A brand new battery-like system that depends on tiny quantities of water confined inside layers of clay may ultimately provide sustainable energy in locations as excessive as Mars.
Vasily Artemov on the Swiss Federal Institute of Expertise and his colleagues constructed the supercapacitor, a kind of battery-like vitality storage system, with elements much like these of typical batteries, together with two electrodes, one with a adverse and one with a constructive cost. However as a substitute of creating these electrodes out of…