It’s a universal truth that battery life on phones is bad. Even with the giant batteries and external battery packs we tote around, most modern smartphones struggle to make it through a full day of use, while the best devices barely scrape through two.

But it didn’t use to be this way: back in the (relatively) old days, phones had (relatively) fantastic battery life, lasting for multiple days at a time without needing to be charged. And, yes, our phones today are vastly more powerful than, say, a Nokia 3310, but why haven’t batteries kept up with the pace of progress?

According to Venkat Srinivasan, director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science and an…

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