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 might ultimately supply sustainable energy in locations as excessive as Mars.
Vasily Artemov on the Swiss Federal Institute of Expertise and his colleagues constructed the supercapacitor, a sort of battery-like power storage system, with parts just like these of standard batteries, together with two electrodes, one with a damaging and one with a optimistic cost. However as an alternative of creating these electrodes out of…