Origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, can be used to create beautiful birds, frogs and other small sculptures. Now an engineer says the technique can be applied to building batteries, too.

Burning a candle could be all it takes to make an inexpensive but powerful electric car battery, according to new research. The research reveals that candle soot could be used to power the kind of lithium ion battery used in plug-in hybrid electric cars. The authors of the study say their discovery opens up the possibilities to use carbon in more powerful batteries, driving down the costs of portable power. Lithium ion batteries power many devices, from smartphones and digital cameras all the way up to cars and even aircraft.

Bioinspired carbon anodes enable high performance in lithium-ion batteries.

One big problem faced by electrodes in rechargeable batteries, as they go through repeated cycles of charging and discharging, is that they must expand and shrink during each cycle — sometimes doubling in volume, and then shrinking back. This can lead to repeated shedding and reformation of its “skin” layer that consumes lithium irreversibly, degrading the battery’s performance over time. Now researchers have found a novel way around that problem: creating an electrode made of nanoparticles with a solid shell, and a “yolk” inside that can change size again and again without affecting the shell.

Ribbons of vanadium oxide and graphene become ultrafast charging and discharging electrodes for lithium-ion batteries in new research. The ribbons are thousands of times thinner than a sheet of paper, yet have potential that far outweighs current materials for their ability to charge and discharge very quickly.