Nuclear batteries, eh? I wonder if they will get these things in a form safe enough to power my digital music player?

Scientists in the US have developed a new fabrication technique that will lead to nuclear batteries that could last for decades. The researchers, based at the University of Rochester, claim that the technique is already ten times more efficient than current nuclear batteries, and has the potential to outstrip them nearly 200 times.

This breakthrough is unlikely to have an impact on your mobile phone or notebook battery life, however. The technology is designed for inaccessible places or under extreme conditions, and is more likely to find its way into pacemakers, implanted defibrillators, deep-space probes or deep-sea sensors, the researchers say. [Read the rest]