Nanotech Battery Breakthrough

Nanotechnology has been in the news a lot lately. After last week's news about the first recall of a nanotechnology product, it's nice to have some good news on the subject.

Last Friday, Reuters released a story that a group of researchers at MIT have engineered the M13 virus, a simple and easily manipulated virus, to create nanowires for microscopic batteries. Previous work has allowed the creation of semiconductor and magnetic nanowires using similar processes.

The genetically modified virus bonds with certain metal ions. Incubating the virus in a cobalt chloride solution allows cobalt oxide crystals to mineralize uniformly along the length. The addition of gold to the solution provides the necessary electrical properties.

The resulting wires, only 6 nanometers in diameter and 880 nanometers long, worked as positive battery electrodes. The researchers hope to build batteries ranging in size from a grain of rice to that of existing hearing-aid batteries. It is unclear from the Reuters article what sort of power can be handled by the wires.