Rice university is researching how to make silicon useable

Well, in all of my incessant searching trying to bring you the latest news in the area of conservation, I ran across this article from Rice University. And as it detailed in that article, they (researchers at Rice University) have been trying to find a way to make silicon work for rechargeable batteries. And I have spoken about this before here also.

But why is silicon so troublesome? In short it degrades in such a way that makes it use unfeasible. But the reason why everyone is trying to figure out how to use it for rechargeable batteries is because silicon can hold ten times what the common graphite can hold. It would sure be an improvement in rechargeable batteries if we could find a way to make silicon work in the anodes of batteries.

Well, this is just what the researchers at Rice have done. Their answer was porous silicon, which you can see a picture of here:

They have not totally solved silicon's problems, but this marks a huge step forward for us all. I truly believe that one day soon we may have an answer to silicon's problems, at least we can hope anyway.