{"id":58,"date":"2010-12-11T05:52:01","date_gmt":"2010-12-11T12:52:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cafe.foundation\/blog\/?p=58"},"modified":"2010-12-11T23:32:31","modified_gmt":"2010-12-12T06:32:31","slug":"a-pair-of-viruss-good-for-your-computer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cafe.foundation\/blog\/a-pair-of-viruss-good-for-your-computer\/","title":{"rendered":"A Pair of Viruses Good for Your Computer – and Maybe Your Electric Vehicle"},"content":{"rendered":"

To say that your battery is “smoking” would normally be the sign of a failed circuit, but researchers at the A. James Clark School of Engineering and College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Maryland may be putting a virus that’s bad even for tobacco to good use in creating a battery that may be up to 10 times more powerful than today’s best lithium cells<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Professor Reza Ghodssi, director of the Institute for Systems Research and Herbert Rabin Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Clark School,\u00a0 is “harnessing and exploiting the ‘self-renewing’ and ‘self-assembling’ properties” of the\u00a0 Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV), which in its unrestrained natural state\u00a0destroys tobacco, tomatoes, peppers and other leafy green things.\u00a0\u00a0 The idea that battery creation is a self-directing event is belied by the University’s video.<\/p>\n