"Nanotube filaments on the battery's electrodes" from the link above.Researchers at MIT at trying to make batteries that can be very quickly charged and be useful for laptops or cell phones. The key, they believe, is to fabricate capacitors with extremely large surface areas. Capacitors store electricity as an electric field between the plates of the capacitor. In order to increase the energy, the researchers are adding nanoscale fibers to the plates. These fibers increase the surface area and thereby increase the amount of electric charge that a capacitor can store.
That's a clever idea, but I wouldn't throw away the batteries you have just yet. These sorts of ideas seem terrific but in practice something usually (but not always!) happens to make the invention less than stellar. Keep your lithium rechargeables around; they'll still plenty useful.
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