The biggest issue facing electric cars currently (arf) isn't only how far - or, rather, how not very far - they'll go on a charge, but how long it takes to recharge the damn things afterwards. Enter a team of researchers at South Korea's Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, who reckon they've made a battery that'll store as much energy as the current generation of lithium ion cells found in the Nissan Leaf and BMW i3, but will recharge not in hours but seconds. Sixteen seconds, to be precise. How? By making it of graphene, an atom-thick, crystalline form of carbon described as the wonder material of the 21st century. The Koreans packed their battery with an especially porous form of graphene with a huge internal area: in fact, a single gram of the stuff has the same surface area as a basketball court. Whuh?
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