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Hitachi claims secret chemical formula will improve battery cathodes, double longevity
Before lithium-ion batteries, portable gadgets were a nightmare, forcing road warriors and Discman-toting teens to either swap disposable cells or deal with rechargables that (with few exceptions) were tricky to recharge. Of course, Li-ion batteries also have a downside: as laptop and cell phone users have no doubt found out, they too become disposable before long. One reason why is that acid in the electrolyte can corrode the cathode material -- and now, Hitachi claims it's found a way to strengthen its own. Using an undisclosed combination of elements to replace some of the manganese used in the company's cathodes, Hitachi claims they can strengthen their crystalline configuration to resist acid, reduce cost, and best of all, double the usable life of a lithium-ion cell to about ten years. We've heard similar claims before, of course, with other battery manufacturers promising us twenty years, but it looks like this technology might make it out of the lab. NEDO, a Japanese government organization, has commissioned Hitachi to bring these batteries to life for industrial applications like wind farms. Cell phones, sadly, will have to wait.
NEDO's Advanced Robotics project enters second phase, boasts totally sweet bots
NEDO, an administrative institute in Japan, has been working on what it calls the "Project for Strategic Development of Advanced Robotics Elemental Technologies" since 2006. The project has now entered its second phase, and boasts some pretty impressive looking bots. Murata Machinery's robotic delivery system (pictured above) which is designed to help in places like hospitals, delivering medications late at night so that nurses and aids don't have to spend a lot of time on such tasks. The company plans to test it and monitor the bot in use at hospitals in order to verify its effectiveness. We don't know about you, but the idea of this guy visiting us late at night when we're feeling low in a hospital is either really awesome or terrifically creepy. Either way, we fully expect this guy to have a starring role in The Phantom of the Opera any day now. Hit the read link to check out the other participants in the project.
Japanese outfits to collaborate on power-saving OLED panels
The energy-saving nature of OLEDs has certainly been debated, but a passel of big name firms and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) are pushing forward with an initiative to promote the technology. Aside from the aforementioned entity, ten companies including Sony, Sharp, Toshiba and Matsushita (Panasonic) are collaborating on the five-year effort, which will likely cost ¥3.5 billion ($32.8 million). In sum, the project is aimed at "developing a core technology to mass-produce 40-inch or larger OLED displays in the late 2010s," and there's even a mention that said companies are racing South Korean firms to get a jump on OLED deployment. Race on, we say.[Via Widescreen Review]
Communication-enabled exercise equipment in the works
While we've seen a number of individuals turning to Nintendo's Wii to shed a few pounds, the next wave of exercise equipment seems to be filtering in. Just weeks after seeing Motivatrix's MX9 Workout Master, five companies have come together in an effort to "develop a communications protocol to establish a connection between home healthcare devices from different manufacturers so that they can exchange information with one another." Mitsubishi, Citizen, Sharp, Tanita, and Hitachi have jointly designed the standard as part of a Japanese healthcare project, which will be "used when interconnecting healthcare equipment such as blood pressure meters, weight scales, and blood glucose meters with home gateway devices." Notably, the protocol can applied to both wired and wireless configurations, and if all goes as planned, it should be rolled out en masse to manufacturers in the Spring of 2008.[Via DigitalWorldTokyo]
