Once again, Apple is doing its best to give electronics a huge boost into the future with the release of the new iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus. The technological top dog has upgraded everything from the phone’s processors to its camera—and Apple has finally brought the much anticipated 3D touch capability to life.

While most consumers focus their attention to the phone’s new entertainment abilities and usage innovation, we like to focus on some different aspects here at ECS. While Apple’s Timothy Cook may not have mentioned electrochemistry or solid state science in announcing the new iPhone, these sciences are what allow for higher processing speeds, improved displays, touch recognition, longer battery life, and much more.

Get a full understanding of the science behind the smartphone.

Highlights of the iPhone 6S:

• Improved 12 megapixel camera
• Qualocomm chip to double LTE speeds from 150 mbps to 300 mbps
• Improved TouchID fingerprint sensor
• New 64-bit chip for 70 percent faster CPU
• 3D touch capability through sensor technology

Get more info on the iPhone 6S.

PS: Listen to technology and engineering expert Lili Deligianni’s podcast on innovation in electronics!

Potatoes are great in many forms: mashed, baked, roasted, electrochemical energy source… Most people have seen or experienced the potato battery experiment in a chemistry class, but BatteryBox is taking this exercise to a whole new level.

As you know, one or two potatoes produce enough energy to power a small digital clock. But how much energy would 110 pound of potatoes produce? Enough to charge a smartphone?

Essentially, the team combined the 110 pounds of potatoes to create a galvanic cell.

PS: Check out some more practical applications of electrochemical energy at the 228th ECS Meeting.

Researchers around the world are in a scientific race to develop a near-perfect lithium-ion battery, and a startup from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) may have just unlocked the secret.

In 2012, Qichao Hu founded SolidEnergy – a startup that grew out of research and academics from MIT. Qichao started with battery technology that he and ECS member Donald Sadoway developed.

Now, the company is claiming to have built a lithium-ion battery that could change battery technology as we know it.

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The 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is coming to a close, but not before showcasing a huge breakthrough in battery technology.

The Israeli start-up company StoreDot showed off their new product at CES: a smartphone battery that can charge in just seconds.

StoreDot’s battery charges 100 times faster than the present lithium-ion batteries and can last about five hours on a two minute charge.

However, the battery cannot be retrofitted to existing devices because most phones would be fried by the 40 amps of electricity. Instead, StoreDot’s battery is completely new – containing special synthesized organic molecules.

“We have reactions in the battery that are non-traditional reactions that allow us to charge very fast, moving ions from an anode to a cathode at a speed that was not possible before we had these materials,” Doron Myersdorf, the company’s chief executive, told BBC.

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