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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) - A Florida teenager was convicted Tuesday of aggravated battery in a horrific 2009 attack on a middle school classmate who was drenched in rubbing alcohol and set on fire. Matthew "Zeke" Bent was accused of orchestrating the attack on Michael Brewer and charged with second-degree murder. The six jurors, who deliberated for just over a day, had the option of finding him guilty of a lesser offense.

Based on this morning's quarterly earnings call, the financial numbers are pointing in the wrong direction for lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems, a company founded 10 years ago based on technology developed at an MIT lab. A123 posted a net loss of $125 million, $40 million more than it lost in the previous quarter. It only brought in $11 million in revenue, down from $40 million in the previous quarter and $18 million a year ago. Meanwhile, its cash is dwindling, down from $187 million at the end of last year to $113 million at the end of the first...

For more than a decade, scientists have tried to improve lithium-based batteries by replacing the graphite in one terminal with silicon, which can store 10 times more charge. But after just a few charge/discharge cycles, the silicon structure would crack and crumble, rendering the battery useless. Now a team led by materials scientist Yi Cui of Stanford and SLAC has found a solution: a cleverly designed double-walled nanostructure that lasts more than 6,000 cycles, far more than needed by electric vehicles or mobile electronics. “This is a very exciting development toward our goal of creating smaller, lighter and longer-lasting batteries...

One of the auto industry's most closely guarded secrets, the enormous cost of batteries for electric cars, has spilled out. Speaking at a forum on green technology, Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally indicated battery packs for the company's Focus electric car costs between $12,000 and $15,000 apiece. "When you move into an all-electric vehicle, the battery size moves up to around 23 kilowatt hours, [and] it weighs around 600 to 700 pounds," Mulally said at Fortune magazine's Brainstorm Green conference in California. "They're around $12,000 to $15,000 [a battery]" for a type of car that normally sells for about...

SEATTLE - A 16-year-old boy from West Seattle says he was held hostage and beaten for hours, all because of the color of his skin. Shane McClellan says two men kicked and whipped him at gunpoint - and told him they singled him out because he is white. Tim McClellan, Shane's father, says he barely recognized his son after the brutal assault. "I didn't know if he was alive or dead," Tim McClellan said. The incident happened as Shane McClellan was walking home from a birthday party at a friend's house Tuesday around 2 a.m. Shane says two men called...

Scientists in Hong Kong have reported, in ArXiv, their experiments to make a graphene battery that they say generates an electrical current by drawing on the ambient thermal energy in the solution in which it is immersed. Researchers led by Zihan Xu of the Department of Applied Physics and Materials Research Centre at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, attached silver and gold electrodes to a graphene sheet, typically 7 mm x 7 mm in area, mounted on a silicon substrate. The assembly was then immersed in a saturated solution of copper chloride (CuCl2), and was found to produce an electrical...

Envia has figured out how “to improve energy density at the anode and cathode and store more lithium.” In short, he claims to have doubled energy density and halved the cost of lithium-ion batteries. And he says that his breakthrough isn’t theoretical—packs are already built on an automotive scale and are being tested by automakers around the world. It’s impossible to verify all that, and Kapadia won’t tell me which automakers he’s working with, though GM is presumably one of them. Specifically, Envia says it has reached an energy density of 400-watt-hours per kilogram in auto-grade lithium-ion cells, and achieved...

With the auto industry pining for a battery breakthrough to lower electric vehicle costs, Envia Systems has some interesting performance data to share. The five-year-old company today is expected to disclose technical details of its batteries which executives say could lead to cutting EV battery pack prices in half in three or four years. Envia Systems' batteries are being evaluated by a number of automakers, including its largest investor General Motors, according to CEO Atul Kapadia. Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57384864-76/startup-envia-battery-promises-to-slash-ev-costs/#ixzz1ncFoCgDL

PROVIDENCE, RI, January 30, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street movement threw condoms on Catholic schoolgirls, refused to allow a Catholic priest to give a closing prayer, and shouted down a pro-life speaker at a Rhode Island right to life rally on Thursday, according to its organizer. The event marked the third time protesters associated with the movement have disrupted a pro-life meeting in a week. About two-dozen members of Occupy Providence hiked from Burnside Park to the 39th Annual Pro-Life State House Rally organized by the Rhode Island State Right to Life Committee on Thursday. Protesters...

2011 saw huge advances in solar, wind and other renewable energy sources, and these advancements will continue into 2012. In fact 2012 could be the year that renewable energy sources start to seriously compete with traditional fossil fuels, at least that is the hope in the battle to reduce carbon emissions and our dependence on dwindling oil stocks. However a major problem with renewable energy sources is that they can rarely provide consistent power levels, due to a myriad of factors outside of human control. Eric Wesoff, an industry analyst with Greentech Media, explains that, “A wind farm only works...

Second iPhone 'explodes' in a week by Agencies 04:28 PM Dec 02, 2011 For the second time in the past week, an iPhone 4 has reportedly exploded, website Mashable reported. In the latest incident, which happened in Brazil on Wednesday morning, the Apple smartphone short-circuited and started to burn about 40cm from a man's face as he slept. Ayla Mota said he awoke to see the iPhone 4, which was plugged in for an overnight charge, sparking and emitting smoke. "At dawn, I woke up seconds before witnessing the burning of my iPhone when I saw a lot of sparks...

does anyone know of one made that can be recharged? all the ones I own (and ones sold in stores) are sealed . if they are left in a cold place(like an unheated garage), they become just as dead as the battery in the car you're trying to start.

Apple on Thursday released an update to iOS 5 that addressed issues many users were having with poor battery performance.The Cupertino, California-based company had been testing the solution for some time, even uncharacteristically reaching out to affected end-users and having them install the potential fix to test its effectiveness. Despite Apple’s determination that iOS 5.0.1 resolved issues related to battery life, however, not all users are finding that to be the case.“After upgrading to 5.0.1 my iPhone is draining the battery even faster,” one user posted to Apple’s support forum. A number of other iPhone owners have taken to Apple’s...

While the most common device for converting light into electricity may be photovoltaic (PV) solar cells, a variety of other devices can perform the same light-to-electricity conversion, such as solar-thermal collectors and rectennas. In a new study, engineers have designed a new device that can convert light of infrared (IR) and visible wavelengths into direct current by using surface plasmon excitations in a simple metal-insulator-metal (MIM) device. The researchers, Fuming Wang and Nicholas A. Melosh of Stanford University, have published their study on the new device in a recent issue of Nano Letters. “The greatest significance thus far is to...

Toyota Motor has developed a secondary electric car battery that can last up to 1,000 km per charge, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported Monday. That is five times the energy storage capacity of existing batteries. Toyota came up with the prototype in collaboration with the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization. The new battery is based on a solid core and its simplified structure means it does not require fire-retardant materials. It eliminates the disadvantages of lithium-ion batteries, which are based on an easily heatable and combustible liquid core. Toyota plans to improve the battery...

Plans to build a high speed railway line from London to Birmingham could be threatened by a small colony of bats, the Government’s environmental advisers have warned... the bats could be a “show-stopper” ...

A team from the National University of Singapore's Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Initiative (NUSNNI), led by principle investigator Dr Xie Xian Ning, has developed the world's first energy-storage membrane. Electrical energy storage and its management is becoming an urgent issue due to climate change and energy shortage. Existing technologies such as rechargeable batteries and supercapacitors are based on complicated configurations including liquid electrolytes, and suffer from difficulties in scaling-up and high fabrication costs. There is also growing public concern and awareness of the impact of traditional energy sources on the environment, spurring a continued search for alternative, green, sustainable energy sources....

A group of gear heads from Croatia has produced a car designed to show that “electric vehicle” doesn’t have to mean “something my granola-eating neighbor drives.” Rimac Automobil, named for its founder, Mate Rimac, unveiled the Concept_One at the International Auto Show in Frankfurt. Designed as a sleek sports car it is powered entirely by batteries, and can, the company says, hit 62 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds, and reach a limit of 190 mph. The batteries carry 92 kilowatt-hours, or enough to power an average American home for three days -- or drive the car 372 miles, enough...

A stretchy binder material that's compatible with existing factories could help electric cars and portable electronics go 30 percent longer. A stretchy binder material that's compatible with existing factories could help electric cars and portable electronics go 30 percent longer. One approach to the problem is to structure these anodes in a totally different way, for example growing shaggy arrays of silicon nanowires that can bend, swell, and move around as lithium enters and exits. This approach is being commercialized by Amprius, a startup in Palo Alto, California. But growing nanowires requires new processes that aren't normally used in battery...

A Pittsburgh company says its battery has the long life and cheap cost needed to be practical for energy storage. Utilities need cheap, long-lasting ways to store the excess energy produced by power plants, especially as intermittent power from solar and wind farms is added to the mix. Unfortunately, the batteries available for grid-level storage are either too expensive or don't last for the thousands of cycles needed to make them cost-effective. A new battery developed by Aquion Energy in Pittsburgh uses simple chemistry—a water-based electrolyte and abundant materials such as sodium and manganese—and is expected to cost $300 for...