NEC started working on organic radical batteries back in 2001 and the company has just introduced their latest development, a 0.3mm super-thin prototype organic battery that appears to be a perfect fit for future integrated circuit cards and may be the world’s thinnest battery yet.

Organic radical batteries are incredibly thin, have a very high energy density and use no heavy metals (therefore no problem of proper disposal). ORBs of 0.7mm thickness were standard until now. The newly developed NEC organic battery is ultra thin and can be printed directly onto a standard IC card of 0.76mm thickness.

And we will be able to add circuit boards with tiny components like a display and antenna onto the surrounding polymer film. According to the company, the new technology will allow us to incorporate features such as a display and data communications to next-gen smart cards.

But for now, all those things that could be incorporated will depend on the battery which comes with a capacity of 3mAh. The company says that this is good for refreshing the integrated display (unspecified) up to 2000 times or for transmitting data via the antenna 35 times before there is a need for a recharge. The incredible thing is that it will take only around 30 seconds for recharging the battery fully. And after 500 recharges, its capacity will be reduced by only 25%.

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Ew. Scratches. Whether they’re on your car or on your phone, they’re not exactly what you want to see. Thanks to some researchers from Case Western Reserve University, minor scratches could really be a thing of the past. All you need is UV light.

They’ve developed a special self-healing polymer that can disassemble and re-assemble itself in a matter of seconds. The bits that make up the polymer are broken apart when you scratch the surface, but expose them to UV light and they melt themselves back into the original configuration.

The net result: no more scratch. And this whole proccess typically takes less than 60 seconds of exposure to UV light. Considering that there is already some UV light when you go outside, I’m wondering if this could just be a permanent fixture on cars. Light scratches really will become a thing of the past.

But where I really want to see it? Gorilla Glass is good. Oleophobic coatings are nice. Now, just add some of these optically healable supramolecular polymers on there and you could have the perfect display and casing for the iPhone 5, don’t you think? It’s already delayed a few months; they can add in this tweak, right?

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