Tech
Lithium-ion batteries just made a big leap in a tiny product
A materials company in Alameda, California, has spent the last decade working to boost the energy stored in lithium-ion batteries, an advance that could enable smaller gadgets and electric vehicles with far greater range.
Sila has developed silicon-based particles that can replace the graphite in anodes and hold more of the lithium ions that carry the current in a battery.
Now the company is delivering its product to the market for the first time, providing a portion of the anode powder in the battery of the forthcoming Whoop 4.0, a fitness wearable. It’s a small device but potentially a big step forward for the battery field, where promising lab results often fail to translate to commercial success.
“Think of the Whoop 4.0 as our Tesla Roadster,” says Gene Berdichevsky, Sila’s CEO, who as Tesla’s seventh employee helped solve some of the critical battery challenges for the company’s first electric vehicle. “It’s really the first device on the market that’s proving this breakthrough.”
SILA
The company’s materials, with a light assist from other advances, increased the energy density in the fitness tracker’s battery by around 17%. That’s a significant gain in a field that generally inches forward by a few percentage points a year.
It’s equivalent to about four years of standard progress, “but in one big jump,” says Venkat Viswanathan, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
Sila still faces some real technical challenges, but the advance is a promising sign for the potential of increasingly capable batteries to help the world shift away from fossil fuels as the dangers of climate change accelerate. Boosting the amount of energy that batteries can store makes it easier for increasingly clean electricity sources to power more of our buildings, vehicles, factories, and businesses.
For the transportation sector, a more energy-dense battery can reduce the costs or extend the range of electric vehicles, addressing two of the biggest issues that have discouraged consumers from giving up their gas guzzlers. It also promises to deliver grid batteries that can save up more energy from solar and wind farms, or consumer gadgets that last longer between charges.
Energy density is the key to the “electrification of everything,” says Berdichevsky, an Innovator Under 35 in 2017.
In the case of the new fitness wearable, the novel battery materials and other improvements made it possible for Boston-based Whoop to shrink the device by 33% while maintaining five days of battery life. The product is now thin enough to be inserted into “smart apparel” as well as being worn like a watch. It goes on sale September 8.
Sila, which announced $590 million in funding in January, also has partnerships in place to develop battery materials for automakers including BMW and Daimler. The company has said its technology could eventually pack as much as 40% more energy into lithium-ion batteries.
Preventing fires
Berdichevsky interviewed for and landed his job at Tesla before his senior year at Stanford University, where he was working toward a degree in mechanical engineering. He ended up playing a key role in addressing a potentially existential risk for the company: that a fire in any one of the thousands of batteries packed into a vehicle would ignite the whole pack.
He set up a program to systematically evaluate a series of battery pack designs. After hundreds of tests, the company developed a combination of battery arrangements, heat transfer materials, and cooling channels that largely prevented runaway fires.
After Tesla launched the Roadster, Berdichevsky felt he had to either commit to another five years to see the company through development of the next vehicle, the Model S—or take the opportunity to try something new.
In the end, he decided he wanted to build something of his own.
DAVID PAUL MORRIS/SILA
Berdichevsky went back to Stanford for a master’s program studying materials, thermodynamics, and physics, in the hope of finding ways to improve storage at the fundamental level. After graduating, he spent a year as an entrepreneur in residence at Sutter Hill Ventures, looking for ideas that could form the basis of his own business.
During that time, he came across a scientific paper identifying a method to produce silicon-based particles for lithium-ion battery anodes.
Researchers have long seen silicon as a promising way to increase the energy in batteries, because its atoms can bond with 10 times more lithium ions by weight than graphite can. That means they hold far more of the charged molecules that produce the electric current in a battery. But silicon anodes tended to crumble during charging, as they swelled to accommodate the ions that shuttle back and forth between the electrodes.
The paper, coauthored by Georgia Institute of Technology professor Gleb Yushin, highlighted the possibility of developing rigid silicon materials with a porous core that could more easily accept and release the lithium ions.
The next year, Berdichevsky cofounded Sila with Yushin and Alex Jacobs, another former Tesla engineer.
Hurdles and delays
The company spent the next decade tweaking its methods and materials, working through more than 50,000 iterations of the chemistry while scaling up its manufacturing capacity. Early on, it decided to develop drop-in materials that manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries could swap in, rather than pursuing the more expensive and riskier route of producing complete batteries itself.
Sila is not as far along as it had initially hoped to be, however.
After securing several million dollars from the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E division, the company at one point told the research agency its materials could be in products by 2017 and in vehicles by 2020. In 2018, when Sila announced its deal with BMW, it said its particles could help power the German automaker’s EVs by 2023.
Berdichevsky says the company now expects to be in vehicles by “more like 2025.” He says that solving the “last mile” problems was simply harder than they expected. Challenges included working with battery manufacturers to get the best performance out of the novel materials.
“We were naïvely optimistic about the challenges of scaling and bringing products to market,” he said in an email.
The Whoop news signals that Sila was able to engineer the particles in a way that offers safety, life cycles, and other battery performance benchmarks similar to those achieved in existing products.
My senior spring in high school, I decided to defer my MIT enrollment by a year. I had always planned to take a gap year, but after receiving the silver tube in the mail and seeing all my college-bound friends plan out their classes and dorm decor, I got cold feet. Every time I mentioned my plans, I was met with questions like “But what about school?” and “MIT is cool with this?”
Yeah. MIT totally is. Postponing your MIT start date is as simple as clicking a checkbox.
COURTESY PHOTO
Now, having finished my first year of classes, I’m really grateful that I stuck with my decision to delay MIT, as I realized that having a full year of unstructured time is a gift. I could let my creative juices run. Pick up hobbies for fun. Do cool things like work at an AI startup and teach myself how to create latte art. My favorite part of the year, however, was backpacking across Europe. I traveled through Austria, Slovakia, Russia, Spain, France, the UK, Greece, Italy, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary.
Moreover, despite my fear that I’d be losing a valuable year, traveling turned out to be the most productive thing I could have done with my time. I got to explore different cultures, meet new people from all over the world, and gain unique perspectives that I couldn’t have gotten otherwise. My travels throughout Europe allowed me to leave my comfort zone and expand my understanding of the greater human experience.
“In Iceland there’s less focus on hustle culture, and this relaxed approach to work-life balance ends up fostering creativity. This was a wild revelation to a bunch of MIT students.”
When I became a full-time student last fall, I realized that StartLabs, the premier undergraduate entrepreneurship club on campus, gives MIT undergrads a similar opportunity to expand their horizons and experience new things. I immediately signed up. At StartLabs, we host fireside chats and ideathons throughout the year. But our flagship event is our annual TechTrek over spring break. In previous years, StartLabs has gone on TechTrek trips to Germany, Switzerland, and Israel. On these fully funded trips, StartLabs members have visited and collaborated with industry leaders, incubators, startups, and academic institutions. They take these treks both to connect with the global startup sphere and to build closer relationships within the club itself.
Most important, however, the process of organizing the TechTrek is itself an expedited introduction to entrepreneurship. The trip is entirely planned by StartLabs members; we figure out travel logistics, find sponsors, and then discover ways to optimize our funding.
COURTESY PHOTO
In organizing this year’s trip to Iceland, we had to learn how to delegate roles to all the planners and how to maintain morale when making this trip a reality seemed to be an impossible task. We woke up extra early to take 6 a.m. calls with Icelandic founders and sponsors. We came up with options for different levels of sponsorship, used pattern recognition to deduce the email addresses of hundreds of potential contacts at organizations we wanted to visit, and all got scrappy with utilizing our LinkedIn connections.
And as any good entrepreneur must, we had to learn how to be lean and maximize our resources. To stretch our food budget, we planned all our incubator and company visits around lunchtime in hopes of getting fed, played human Tetris as we fit 16 people into a six-person Airbnb, and emailed grocery stores to get their nearly expired foods for a discount. We even made a deal with the local bus company to give us free tickets in exchange for a story post on our Instagram account.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
How ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk
For millions of Chinese people, the first software they download onto devices is always the same: a keyboard app. Yet few of them are aware that it may make everything they type vulnerable to spying eyes.
QWERTY keyboards are inefficient as many Chinese characters share the same latinized spelling. As a result, many switch to smart, localized keyboard apps to save time and frustration. Today, over 800 million Chinese people use third-party keyboard apps on their PCs, laptops, and mobile phones.
But a recent report by the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto–affiliated research group, revealed that Sogou, one of the most popular Chinese keyboard apps, had a massive security loophole. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
Why we should all be rooting for boring AI
Earlier this month, the US Department of Defense announced it is setting up a Generative AI Task Force, aimed at “analyzing and integrating” AI tools such as large language models across the department. It hopes they could improve intelligence and operational planning.
But those might not be the right use cases, writes our senior AI reporter Melissa Heikkila. Generative AI tools, such as language models, are glitchy and unpredictable, and they make things up. They also have massive security vulnerabilities, privacy problems, and deeply ingrained biases.
Applying these technologies in high-stakes settings could lead to deadly accidents where it’s unclear who or what should be held responsible, or even why the problem occurred. The DoD’s best bet is to apply generative AI to more mundane things like Excel, email, or word processing. Read the full story.
This story is from The Algorithm, Melissa’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
The ice cores that will let us look 1.5 million years into the past
To better understand the role atmospheric carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate cycles, scientists have long turned to ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where snow layers accumulate and compact over hundreds of thousands of years, trapping samples of ancient air in a lattice of bubbles that serve as tiny time capsules.
By analyzing those cores, scientists can connect greenhouse-gas concentrations with temperatures going back 800,000 years. Now, a new European-led initiative hopes to eventually retrieve the oldest core yet, dating back 1.5 million years. But that impressive feat is still only the first step. Once they’ve done that, they’ll have to figure out how they’re going to extract the air from the ice. Read the full story.
—Christian Elliott
This story is from the latest edition of our print magazine, set to go live tomorrow. Subscribe today for as low as $8/month to ensure you receive full access to the new Ethics issue and in-depth stories on experimental drugs, AI assisted warfare, microfinance, and more.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 How AI got dragged into the culture wars
Fears about ‘woke’ AI fundamentally misunderstand how it works. Yet they’re gaining traction. (The Guardian)
+ Why it’s impossible to build an unbiased AI language model. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Researchers are racing to understand a new coronavirus variant
It’s unlikely to be cause for concern, but it shows this virus still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. (Nature)
+ Covid hasn’t entirely gone away—here’s where we stand. (MIT Technology Review)
+ Why we can’t afford to stop monitoring it. (Ars Technica)
3 How Hilary became such a monster storm
Much of it is down to unusually hot sea surface temperatures. (Wired $)
+ The era of simultaneous climate disasters is here to stay. (Axios)
+ People are donning cooling vests so they can work through the heat. (Wired $)
4 Brain privacy is set to become important
Scientists are getting better at decoding our brain data. It’s surely only a matter of time before others want a peek. (The Atlantic $)
+ How your brain data could be used against you. (MIT Technology Review)
5 How Nvidia built such a big competitive advantage in AI chips
Today it accounts for 70% of all AI chip sales—and an even greater share for training generative models. (NYT $)
+ The chips it’s selling to China are less effective due to US export controls. (Ars Technica)
+ These simple design rules could turn the chip industry on its head. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Inside the complex world of dissociative identity disorder on TikTok
Reducing stigma is great, but doctors fear people are self-diagnosing or even imitating the disorder. (The Verge)
7 What TikTok might have to give up to keep operating in the US
This shows just how hollow the authorities’ purported data-collection concerns really are. (Forbes)
8 Soldiers in Ukraine are playing World of Tanks on their phones
It’s eerily similar to the war they are themselves fighting, but they say it helps them to dissociate from the horror. (NYT $)
9 Conspiracy theorists are sharing mad ideas on what causes wildfires
But it’s all just a convoluted way to try to avoid having to tackle climate change. (Slate $)
10 Christie’s accidentally leaked the location of tons of valuable art 
Seemingly thanks to the metadata that often automatically attaches to smartphone photos. (WP $)
Quote of the day
“Is it going to take people dying for something to move forward?”
—An anonymous air traffic controller warns that staffing shortages in their industry, plus other factors, are starting to threaten passenger safety, the New York Times reports.
The big story
Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present
October 2022
Since its birth in the late 2000s, effective altruism has aimed to answer the question “How can those with means have the most impact on the world in a quantifiable way?”—and supplied methods for calculating the answer.
It’s no surprise that effective altruisms’ ideas have long faced criticism for reflecting white Western saviorism, alongside an avoidance of structural problems in favor of abstract math. And as believers pour even greater amounts of money into the movement’s increasingly sci-fi ideals, such charges are only intensifying. Read the full story.
—Rebecca Ackermann
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Watch Andrew Scott’s electrifying reading of the 1965 commencement address ‘Choose One of Five’ by Edith Sampson.
+ Here’s how Metallica makes sure its live performances ROCK. ($)
+ Cannot deal with this utterly ludicrous wooden vehicle.
+ Learn about a weird and wonderful new instrument called a harpejji.
