Yi Cui, an assistant professor for Material Sciences and Engineering at California's prestigious Stanford University has come up with an ingeniousand lightweight way to store power - making batteries using plain-vanilla copier paper.

The professor and his team created a working prototype , by coating a sheet of paper with ink made from silver and carbon nanotubes (tiny cylinders of carbon and silver that are capable of collecting electric charge). The coated paper was then heated through, which turned it into a super-conductive 'battery', that worked even when 'crumpled'.

Because paper is very porous, it absorbs a lot more ink than the materials currently being used, and acts as an excellent storage device, ten times stronger than the lithium-iodide batteries that are currently used to power laptops.

Professor Yi believes that his battery can be developed for commercial use very easily, and because of its high storage capacity and lightweight, would be extremely useful for a number of commercial applications, including electric and hybrid cars, which need a lot of power, fast!

sources:daily.co.uk, stanford.edu/news,bbcnews.co.uk