Fruit That Smells Like Butt Could Charge Your iPhone

The durian, a husked tree fruit from Southeast Asia, may smell unspeakably terrible, but it still tastes sweet and delicious like its closely related cousin, the jackfruit. And the two fleshy fruits could be key ingredients in a cutting-edge approach to lightning-fast electric charging, from your iPhone to your Tesla.

Don't expect manufacturers to shove tiny pieces of the spiky fruit into your car battery. Instead, Gomes and his team have uncovered a process wherein they can turn the guts of the fruit into supercapacitors that can store vast amounts of energy. Once again, the researchers note in their paper, nature has already come up with an extraordinary solution. They just needed to mimic it.

We're specifically talking about electrochemical supercapacitors, or"electrical double layer capacitors." These are"ideal energy storage candidates," for applications from portable medical devices to batteries used in transportation, according to the authors. Batteries have two electrodes, separated by an electrolyte, which is just a chemical substance that serves as a catalyst for a chemical reaction inside the battery. Those reactions convert chemicals inside a battery into new substances that release electrical energy along the way. Once all chemicals inside have been depleted, the processes stop and the battery is dead. Every time you've replaced your smoke alarm batteries , you've experienced this energy death.

Enter supercapacitors, which have larger metal plates inside than your average capacitor. Each is coated with a porous substance like activated charcoal, which creates a larger surface area for storing more charges. If you pretend that electrical energy is water, a regular old capacitor is like a cloth, holding just a bit of the spilled water, and a supercapacitor is like a sponge.

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