Nobel for a battery breakthrough was decades in the making

(From left) John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino who together won the Nobel Chemistry Prize in October 2019 for the development of lithium-ion batteries. — AFP

Looking back on the year in science, the coolest advances seem to be coming in areas such as gene editing and quantum computing. This is research pointing with confidence to the future. Yet we should remember that some of the most important scientific discoveries take place almost without notice, in seemingly boring fields like materials science or chemistry.

Indeed, nearly all of the roughly five billion mobile phones now in use run on compact lithium-ion batteries, which didn't exist before 1991. Without this technology – based on subtle advances in chemistry – a lightweight smartphone would feel more like a brick, and the mobile communications revolution would never have happened. The scientists behind this battery revolution were awarded 2019's Nobel Prize in chemistry, and their research illustrates just how tricky it is to store chemical energy safely and reliably in compact pieces of matter.