The rise of personal technology has an ugly side: Its heavy reliance on heavy metals like nickel and cobalt that are mined in developing countries to be used for manufacturing batteries. It’s arduous, backbreaking work that pays little, involves child labor, and causes the loss of lives in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo. We may now have a ray of hope in the form of new and vastly improved battery tech under development at IBM Research. It eschews nickel and cobalt for three new materials that can be extracted from seawater, thereby negating the need for mining these…

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