Making Batteries Out of Crab Shells May Be a Great Idea

Plug these guys into your Tesla.Photo: Brendon Thorne (Getty Images)The world could create more sustainable batteries with an unusual source: crustaceans. In a paper published this week in the journal Matter, researchers say they have made a biodegradable battery with a substance found in crab and lobster shells.A crucial part of the way that batteries work is an electrolyte substance that sits between the two electric terminals at either end, which helps ions move back and forth between the positively and negatively charged terminals to generate electricity. Conventional batteries rely on lead or lithium (e.g., lead-acid batteries and lithium-ion batteries), but these batteries come with a host of issues.We’re going to need a huge amount of batteries to move off of fossil fuels, but traditional electrolyte substances bring with them a host of new issues: They can be incredibly…

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