On his 96th<\/sup> birthday today, John Goodenough and his research team\u2019s latest findings are the subject of much speculation.\u00a0 He, fellow scientist Maria Braga, and his research team have created a battery claimed to be three times as energy dense as existing lithium-ion contemporaries, but exhibiting the counterintuitive property of improving with repeated charging cycles.<\/p>\n Goodenough\u2019s career began in 1943 (a year after your editor was born) with the award of his bachelor\u2019s degree in mathematics from Yale University, followed his master\u2019s and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1951 and 1952 respectively.\u00a0 He worked at MIT and in 1976, left to become head of Oxford University\u2019s Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory from 1976 to 1986.\u00a0 In 1986, he assumed the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, at an age where most men are cashing in their 401k\u2019s.<\/p>\n