[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Lasts twenty times as long probably means that it will hold a charge twenty times longer while not being used.

Or will survive more charging cycles before it dies. Lithium batteries only have a limited number of recharges, before the amount of power they will hold starts going down.

All other hype aside, I take the statement to mean that this “titanium dioxide gel anode” reduces the internal resistance of the lithium battery enough to allow, supposedly, 20x current charging without reducing the number of charge/discharge cycles the battery can endure before degrading. Alternatively, I suppose, the same battery could withstand 20x the number of charge/discharge cycles if charged at the normal (not 20x faster) rate.

The only thing I don’t understand, based on this theory, is why the same battery that can be charged 20x as fast wouldn’t also be able to efficiently discharge at the same 20x rate. And why, if such be the case, the researcher didn’t make that claim.

[PapaBear3625]

Rather than continue to guess, I went and googled up the Science Daily article that the original post was clumsily summarizing.

The article says: The new battery will be able to endure more than 10,000 charging cycles -- 20 times more than the current 500 cycles of today's batteries.