Everyday Inventions
How Rechargeable Batteries Store Energy
A rechargeable battery does not hold electricity. It holds chemical potential, and lithium ions moving between two electrodes turn that potential into current and back again.
Category
Everyday Inventions
Batteries, LEDs, solar panels, microwaves and induction cooktops: the physics behind gadgets we use without a second thought.
Articles in this category
6 articles · 30 quiz questions (10 easy, 10 medium, 10 hard).
Everyday Inventions
What Happens During Fast Charging
Fast charging is not a magic trick. It is a negotiation between a charger, a battery management system, and the limits of lithium-ion chemistry.
Everyday Inventions
How Solar Panels Turn Light into Electricity
A solar panel has no moving parts. Photons free electrons inside a silicon junction, and a built-in electric field steers them into a current.
Everyday Inventions
How LED Bulbs Produce Light
An LED makes light without a glowing filament. Electrons and holes recombine inside a semiconductor, and the band gap decides the color.
Everyday Inventions
How a Microwave Oven Heats Food
A microwave oven does not cook with heat from a flame or coil. It fills a metal box with radio waves that make water molecules in food rotate and warm up.
Everyday Inventions
How an Induction Cooktop Works
An induction cooktop does not heat its own surface. A changing magnetic field makes electric currents flow inside the pan, and the pan becomes the burner.
Other categories
Computers and Devices
From the keyboard layout you type on to the sensors that recognize your fingerprint, everyday devices are full of design decisions with a story behind them.
Internet and Connectivity
Airplane mode, Bluetooth, the cloud and encryption: what really happens when your devices talk to each other and to the network.
Image, Sound and Media
How QR codes and barcodes carry data, how cameras capture light, how compression shrinks files and how headphones erase noise.