Recharging your cellphone battery for hours may one day become a thing of the past. A student from California has become the focus of attention after bagging 2nd place on the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award for her breakthrough in energy-efficient storage devices and recharging.

Eesha Khare, an 18 year old student from California, won a scholarship worth $50,000 from Intel for a supercapacitor that has the possibility of not only charging a cellphone battery within 30 seconds but also lasting ten times longer than the batteries commonly used today. In its current state however, the technology has been shown to light up a LED light.

Nonetheless, the technology is promising. When it reaches mass production, battery life will no longer become an issue for consumers who are constantly bombarded by power-hungry apps that gobble up their gadgets’ batteries in a few hours. With quick recharging, they no longer have to bring backup power source and worry about forgetting to charge their smartphones overnight or getting cut off in the middle of a chat or call due to a dying battery.

Other young scientists were honored and given awards during the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Top winner Ionut Alexandru Budisteanu from Romania won a $75,000 scholarship for designing an AI system for self-driving cars. Henry Wanjune Lin of Louisiana is another $50,000 scholarship awardee for his valuable data to better understand topics in astrophysics.

Would you be interested in having this kind of charger?

[Source]

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  1. meh… same battery tech… just a new charging method… we need a new way to power up our devices.

  2. OMG cant wait for this! basically no patent yet, not released commercially.. if it does, im sure major corporations would sell it hard, at an extremely high price i suppose.

    then it`d be several years before actual middle class people can afford to get one.