Panasonic's Future High Power Lithium Ion Batteries Will Kick 20-30% Harder [Battery]

Great news: Panasonic not only started mass producing laptop type battery with a record setting rating of 3.1 amp hours this December, but in the next few years, will make these cells with up to 4.0 amps in 2013. Yowzer.
Part of the secret is to use nickel instead of carbon for the positive terminal in each cell. The previous record at Panasonic for type cells were 2.9 amp hours, and a quick search shows that most are in the 2.2 amp range.
Battery tech still remains one of the slowest developing sectors in technology, which is why Obama put billions of dollars in grant money towards its research. And why this is great news for all.
[Gizmodo via Panasonic]

Panasonic Delivering a Lithium Storage Battery That Can Power Your Home For a Week [Batteries]

After officially taking over Sanyo earlier this week, Panasonic is hitting the ground running with a joint venture aimed at developing a powerful lithium-ion storage battery than could store enough juice to power an average [Japanese] home for a week.
The battery will also include a system that will allow users to monitor their electricity usage through their televisions. Seems like a viable alternative to solar batteries and fuel cells, but I'm curious to know how a week of powering a Japanese home equates to powering a typical American home. Either way, the technology won't be available until sometime in 2011.
[Gizmodo via Physorg]

sgi octane iii personal supercomputer: my pc’s faster than your pc.

SGI’s new Octane III workstation takes the speed and performance that you’d usually find in a rack full of machines and puts it alongside your desk.

By leveraging modern miniaturization, the Octane III can handle up to 80 CPU cores, yes that’s EIGHT-ZERO CPU cores, along with up to 1TB, yes that’s ONE TERABYTE of RAM. If that’s not enough, the top-of-the line config has room for ten 2.5″ SATA II hard drives. And it all fits in a box that’s not much bigger than your average workstation tower (a 1-foot by 2-foot footprint).
The Octane III workstation can be purchased in a variety of insanely powerful configurations, including:

• Ten dual-socket, Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based nodes.
• One dual-socket, Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based workstation with advanced NVIDIA graphics and/or GP-GPU card support.
• Nineteen single-socket, Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 3400 series-based nodes.
• Nineteen single-socket, Dual-Core Intel Atom processor-based nodes.

Prices for the Octane III start at $7999 (USD) and go up from there. While that might sound like a lot for a desktop PC, this thing is in a league all by itself.
I can’t wait to play some CRYSIS on this bad boy.
[via SlipperyBrick]

Japan to Spend $21,000,000,000 on a Power Plant in F%#king Space [Space]

Jolly shit, Japan is getting prepped to drop $21 billion on a solar power station in space, one that will beam enough energy back to Earth to power 294,000 homes. With no cables.
The whole deal is being put together by Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and industrial design company IGI Corp. The plan involves a gigantic solar panel floating around in space, soaking up a gigawatt of energy and beaming it to Earth without the use of cables. And they hope to have it ready to rock within four years.
Pretty amazing stuff. Here's hoping it works well and doesn't end up giving the entire country of Japan cancer. Thanks for testing that whole thing out for us, guys! [Bloomberg via Inhabitat]