It is a nice idea, but charging a battery causes the battery to heat up and the faster you charge it, the hotter it gets. Trying to charge it in 20 seconds would most likely destroy a battery. Now, I can see the application used to store energy lost while braking in a car and then being released when you want to speed up.
Failure of journalism. Her work seems to concentrate on capacitors rather than batteries. Capacitors can charge and discharge very quickly.
Of course, as who_would_fardels_bear points out in post 12 rapid discharge of large amounts of energy can be pretty spectacular in both heat and light, as well as sound. ;-)
Nothing new, here, just basic physics...
My impression is that this capacitor is supposed to replace the battery in the cell phone (in other words be the battery) and that the capacitor can be charged in 20 seconds - but that is unclear...
That's a pretty good application for something like this. It would need more than 10,000 cycles though to be practical.
Just what do you think a "hybrid" car does?