We’ve Been Using Lithium-Ion Batteries for Decades. Now We Know More About How They Work

In science, there is a surprisingly long list of things we still haven’t exactly figured out yet but still use because they work. This unexpectedly has been the case for lithium-ion batteries—a power source for electric vehicles and various portable electronics—where scientists knew what the mechanism was but weren’t sure exactly how it worked.

Fortunately, MIT scientists have found the answer. For a Science paper published October 2, researchers describe a model that illustrates how…