Paper battery, no more turning the page?

The birthplace of an ideal starts in the lab for some, but in the back pages of newspapers for the vast majority of us.

Take the paper battery, for instance. Reuters has a short piece on it: Scientists say paper battery could be in the works.

Basically, I lament, it’s a bunch of gibberish to me, something about carbon nanomaterials, you know, the way ink sticks to paper. Anyway, this paper battery would be light-weight and low-cost, perfect for powering cars and anything else “that requires instant high power,” and “they are also good for grid-connected energy storage.”

The technology could be commercialized within a short time, the article concludes.

Are we so immuned to inventions that something like a cheap, light paper battery that will power our future is introduced to us as a 9 paragraph tid-bit buried meaninglessly between Tiger and Baghdad bombings?

Or is this just another hot air balloon coming out of the scientific community to scam investors or threaten competitors?

It isn’t easy any more: understanding the technology, never mind understanding the motive of why science is talking about it. Still … a paper battery sounds pretty neat, whatever the hell it is.