A team of Canadian and German scientists have found a way to fabricate a superconducting material, made of a silicon-hydrogen compound, that does not require cooling. They say that the breakthrough means we will be able to cut the power usage of all sorts of devices from refrigerators to cell phones.

This new material is super-compressed instead of being super-cooled like conventional superconductors, allowing scientists to create superconducting wires that work at room temperature.

Superconductors offer no electrical resistance, meaning that energy will not be lost while a current is traveling along a superconducting wire.

If the scientists can find a way to mass-produce this material, we could see a new age in electronics. Battery life would improve dramatically for all sorts of gadgets, and power usage would go down for anything that stays plugged in. Hopefully they can figure out the magic formula soon.

Texas Instruments has designed a proof-of-concept chip that uses a tenth of the power of modern-day chips. This is a huge innovation that could lead to far better battery life for anything that uses a chip and is powered by batteries including phones, medical devices, and sensors.

The jump in efficiency was attained by reducing the amount of energy flowing round the chip from 1.0 volts to 0.3. There is also a built-in DC-to-DC converter to greatly reduce power consumption without needing an external unit. Enough of the tech jabber and back to real life.

The chip uses so little energy that it can be completely powered by ambient heat sources, such as the body heat of a human. How awesome is that? We would love to see more advancements in this direction so we can ditch our chargers and power all of our gadgetry with body heat.

Cell phones might soon have the ability to predict when they’ll be plugged in and could even intelligently estimate how many calls a user is likely to make over a period of time, based on findings in a paper[pdf] by researchers at Intel and Rutgers University. They would then use that information to provide better battery life.

The devised system, dubbed CABMAN (for context-aware battery management architecture
for mobile devices*), would be based on three main principles:

- The availability of crucial applications should not be compromised by non-important ones
- Opportunities for charging should be predicted to allow devices to determine how much energy they can expect to have, instead of simply going by the battery level
- Context, such as location information, can be used to predict charging opportunities

CABMAN would predict where it can be charged by learning which towers are nearby when it’s plugged in. Then, by tracking location and processing call logs, the system knows when to alert a user to plug the cell phone in or to stop using battery intensive applications (or not do anything at all if it thinks the phone will be plugged in soon). This, for example, could know when to turn off a phone’s music player on an airplane if the phone won’t be able to make any calls soon.

A prototype was tested using data from another project. The software was on average 12 minutes away from predicting charging opportunities - a great result. The future call time prediction didn’t work as well, so more time is needed to perfect that aspect.

This research is showing us a very interesting future for cell phones, indeed. With this kind of “smarts” our future phones will be all but bulletproof, predicting our behavior perfectly and adapting themselves to suit our needs. Hopefully the wait will not be too long.

* Yes, we know that “mobile devices” doesn’t start with an “N” and have no idea who was responsible for naming this project and why this slipped through.