windycaves asked: Recently there was an article in Popsci, and it talked about improvements to the anode of the lithium battery, using silicon atoms to improve capacity and performance. Will the common man ever see anything from that?

Yes, it’s highly possible we will.

When lithium-ion batteries charge up, lithium ions fill up a graphite electrode (they “intercalate” into it). Silicon can hold more lithium than graphite, so researchers are figuring out how to get silicon to last many charge-discharge cycles. We may soon have lithium-ion batteries that hold twice the charge of our current ones, because they swap out the graphite with silicon.

However, while this will make the batteries we use for hand-held electronics better (cell phones, laptops, etc), I can’t see a massive scale-up of lithium-ion batteries, whether they use silicon or not. In other words, I don’t believe lithium-ion batteries will power every car in America. But maybe your laptop will last 10 hours on a charge.