As anyone using a laptop on an international flight or trying to put the pedal to the metal in their electric car will tell you, batteries are not advancing at the rate of the rest of technology. While many researchers have been looking to high-energy devices, called supercapacitors, or to a total battery overhaul to solve our consumer gadget energy crises, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have merely tweaked a well-known and widely-used battery material to make a lithium-ion battery capable of discharging and recharging electricity like a fire hose rather than a faucet. "When you go from cell phone or laptop batteries to large car batteries, three things are important," says Arumugam Manthiram, engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1997, Manthiram's former mentor John Goodenough first demonstrated that lithium iron phosphate (yes, a name confusingly similar to that of the battery it serves) is useful as a battery material, but it seemed to represent a compromise. When a typical lithium-ion battery is discharging electricity, lithium ions flow from the anode (the negatively charged terminal made of graphite) through an electrolyte and into spaces within the crystals in the cathode (the positively charged terminal made of lithium iron phosphate). Compared with the highly organized and structured lithium iron phosphate crystals, this glass is amorphous and disorderly at the atomic scale, creating lots of possible entry routes for ions and helping, essentially, to funnel the ions into the cathode material. Ceder and Kang's results, announced in the 12 March issue of Nature, are lithium-ion batteries able to achieve complete discharge in tens of seconds - more than 100 times faster than lithium-ion batteries currently on the market  - with relatively little loss in their capacity to charge after many cycles of recharging.