Tech
Concrete ‘battery’ now packs 10 times the power
Concrete already builds our world, and now it’s one step closer to powering it, too. Made by combining cement, water, ultra-fine carbon black (with nanoscale particles), and electrolytes, electron-conducting carbon concrete (ec3, pronounced “e-c-cubed”) creates a conductive “nanonetwork” inside concrete that could enable everyday structures like walls, sidewalks, and bridges to store and release electrical energy. In other words, the concrete around us could one day double as giant “batteries.”
As MIT researchers report in a new PNAS paper, optimized electrolytes and manufacturing processes have increased the energy storage capacity of the latest ec3 supercapacitors by an order of magnitude.
In 2023, storing enough energy to meet the daily needs of the average home would have required about 45 cubic meters of ec3, roughly the amount of concrete used in a typical basement. Now, with the improved electrolyte, that same task can be achieved with about 5 cubic meters, the volume of a typical basement wall.
“A key to the sustainability of concrete is the development of ‘multifunctional concrete,’ which integrates functionalities like this energy storage, self-healing, and carbon sequestration. Concrete is already the world’s most-used construction material, so why not take advantage of that scale to create other benefits?” asks Admir Masic, lead author of the new study, MIT Electron-Conducting Carbon-Cement-Based Materials Hub (EC³ Hub) co-director, and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) at MIT.
The improved energy density was made possible by a deeper understanding of how the nanocarbon black network inside ec3 functions and interacts with electrolytes.
Using focused ion beams for the sequential removal of thin layers of the ec3 material, followed by high-resolution imaging of each slice with a scanning electron microscope (a technique called FIB-SEM tomography), the team across the EC³ Hub and MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub was able to reconstruct the conductive nanonetwork at the highest resolution yet. This approach allowed the team to discover that the network is essentially a fractal-like “web” that surrounds ec3 pores, which is what allows the electrolyte to infiltrate and for current to flow through the system.
“Understanding how these materials ‘assemble’ themselves at the nanoscale is key to achieving these new functionalities,” adds Masic.
Equipped with their new understanding of the nanonetwork, the team experimented with different electrolytes and their concentrations to see how they impacted energy storage density.
As Damian Stefaniuk, first author and EC³ Hub research scientist, highlights, “we found that there is a wide range of electrolytes that could be viable candidates for ec3. This even includes seawater, which could make this a good material for use in coastal and marine applications, perhaps as support structures for offshore wind farms.”
At the same time, the team streamlined the way they added electrolytes to the mix. Rather than curing ec3 electrodes and then soaking them in electrolyte, they added the electrolyte directly into the mixing water. Since electrolyte penetration was no longer a limitation, the team could cast thicker electrodes that stored more energy.
The team achieved the greatest performance when they switched to organic electrolytes, especially those that combined quaternary ammonium salts—found in everyday products like disinfectants—with acetonitrile, a clear, conductive liquid often used in industry. A cubic meter of this version of ec3—about the size of a refrigerator—can store over 2 kilowatt-hours of energy. That’s about enough to power an actual refrigerator for a day.
While batteries maintain a higher energy density, ec3 can in principle be incorporated directly into a wide range of architectural elements—from slabs and walls to domes and vaults—and last as long as the structure itself.
“The Ancient Romans made great advances in concrete construction. Massive structures like the Pantheon stand to this day without reinforcement. If we keep up their spirit of combining material science with architectural vision, we could be at the brink of a new architectural revolution with multifunctional concretes like ec3,” proposes Masic.
Taking inspiration from Roman architecture, the team built a miniature ec3 arch to show how structural form and energy storage can work together. Operating at 9 volts, the arch supported its own weight and additional load while powering an LED light.
However, something unique happened when the load on the arch increased: the light flickered. This is likely due to the way stress impacts electrical contacts or the distribution of charges.
“There may be a kind of self-monitoring capacity here. If we think of an ec3 arch at an architectural scale, its output may fluctuate when it’s impacted by a stressor like high winds. We may be able to use this as a signal of when and to what extent a structure is stressed, or monitor its overall health in real time,” envisions Masic.
The latest developments in ec³ technology bring it a step closer to real-world scalability. It’s already been used to heat sidewalk slabs in Sapporo, Japan, due to its thermally conductive properties, representing a potential alternative to salting.
“With these higher energy densities and demonstrated value across a broader application space, we now have a powerful and flexible tool that can help us address a wide range of persistent energy challenges,” explains Stefaniuk.
“One of our biggest motivations was to help enable the renewable energy transition. Solar power, for example, has come a long way in terms of efficiency. However, it can only generate power when there’s enough sunlight. So, the question becomes: How do you meet your energy needs at night, or on cloudy days?”
Franz-Josef Ulm, EC³ Hub co-director and CEE professor, continues, “The answer is that you need a way to store and release energy. This has usually meant a battery, which often relies on scarce or harmful materials. We believe that ec3 is a viable substitute, letting our buildings and infrastructure meet our energy storage needs.”
The team is working toward applications like parking spaces and roads that could charge electric vehicles, as well as homes that can operate fully off the grid.
“What excites us most is that we’ve taken a material as ancient as concrete and shown that it can do something entirely new,” says James Weaver, a co-author on the paper who is an associate professor of design technology and materials science and engineering at Cornell University, as well as a former EC³ Hub researcher.
“By combining modern nanoscience with an ancient building block of civilization, we’re opening a door to infrastructure that doesn’t just support our lives, it powers them.”
More information:
Damian Stefaniuk et al, High energy density carbon–cement supercapacitors for architectural energy storage, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2511912122
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Unlike Elon Musk with his list of broken promises, the stats don’t lie. Tesla has lost the title of the world’s largest maker of EVs to Chinese automaker BYD. The signs have been there for a while, with BYD besting Tesla sales in Europe a number of times during 2025. Now it’s official on a global basis.
Despite being blocked from entering the US market, BYD’s seemingly unstoppable rise continues as its EV sales rose last year by 28 percent to 2.25 million. In contrast, Tesla announced today it delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025—its second annual decline in a row, and a 16 percent year-over-year decline for the fourth quarter. This is not merely the China brand edging ahead of Tesla in the electric vehicle race; it’s a marked shift.
Last week, BYD stated that in 2025 it sold 4.6 million “new energy vehicles” (which includes both full EVs and plug-in hybrids) globally, with more than a million of these being exported cars. Its passenger vehicle exports specifically were up more than 145 percent year-on-year.
The news comes after a frankly disastrous year for Tesla that saw the high-selling Model Y, crucial for both Elon Musk and his car company, get a half-hearted refresh that bombed, failing to reverse sales woes. It was also a year that disclosed just how few people bought the much-berated Cybertruck; in March, yet another recall revealed the company had apparently sold less than 50,000 electric pickups since customer deliveries began 14 months previously. Musk had told investors Tesla would sell 250,000 Cybertrucks per year.
With Tesla sales down in the US and in free fall in Europe, Musk turned to US president Donald Trump for help. Trump obliged by morphing the White House South Lawn into a makeshift Tesla showroom, claiming he would himself purchase a racy Model S Plaid. But by June it was reported Trump might be selling the car after publicly falling out with Musk.
Just last month, EV news site Electrek reported that Musk’s SpaceX had bought tens of millions of dollars worth of Cybertrucks that supposedly Tesla can’t sell. (You can see the pickups all lined up at SpaceX in this video.) If true, that move would significantly bolster Tesla’s financial performance in 2025’s fourth quarter, providing at least some respite for the automaker after the US ended its EV tax credits at the end of the third quarter.
“Tesla still has formidable assets, brand recognition, manufacturing know-how, and a strong installed base,” says Andy Palmer, former COO of Nissan and former CEO of Aston Martin Lagonda. “The challenge is that the market has matured while the product line has not moved fast enough. People are struggling to justify spending on a Tesla when other brands, including those from China, are delivering more innovative and advanced products.”
This blurring of the lines between audio and health devices looks set to be a trend across the industry. “We really want to make sure that we take care of our customers’ hearing,” says Miikka Tikander, the Helsinki-based head of audio at Bang & Olufsen. Tikander points to recent data about the decline in hearing health in young adults and reports that there was a lot of emphasis from manufacturers on ANC and hearing health at the AES’ Headphone Technology conference in Espoo, Finland this August.
“Apple has a big lead in that area,” he says. “We want to make sure that our headphones can adapt, make this choice [on when to block out sound] on your behalf, if you let it, of course. Some people don’t like that idea, but if there’s a noisy event in your surroundings, the headset can take care of it, just tune it out a bit and get you back to normal listening once you are away from that noise.”
Enter the “Sound Bubble”
Hearvana AI is one startup looking to go much further than the AirPods’ current suite of noise canceling and ambient noise features. Cofounded by Shyam Gollakota, a computer science & engineering professor at the University of Washington, and two of his students, Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen, Hearvana recently raised $6 million in a pre-seed round which included none other than Amazon’s Alexa Fund.
One of the startup’s first big innovations was “semantic hearing,” which was the first project they approached, around three years ago. The team built a hardware prototype—a pair of on-ear headphones with six microphones across the headband, connected to an Orange Pi microcontroller—to test out a model that had been trained to recognize 20 different types of ambient sounds. This included things like sirens, car horns, birdsong, crying babies, alarm clocks, pets, and people talking, and then allowed the user to isolate say, one person’s voice as a “spotlight,” and block out all the other frequencies.
“So I’m going to the beach and I want to listen to just ocean sounds and not the people talking next to me, or I’m in the house vacuum cleaning but I still want to listen to people knocking on the door or important sounds, like a baby crying,” explains Gollakota, who is based in Seattle. “And that’s what we solved first. This was the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a door knock. They sound pretty different, right?”
Other Smart Scales
Renpho MorphoScan for $150: The Renpho MorphoScan full-body scanner looks surprisingly similar to the Runstar FG2015, including a near-identical display attached to the handlebars. Well, spoiler alert, they are basically the same scale. They even use the same app to collect data (and you can even use both scales simultaneously with it). The only reason this scale isn’t our top pick for the category is that it’s $15 more expensive. You can rest assured that a price war is looming.
Arboleaf Body Fat Scale CS20W for $40: This affordable Bluetooth scale isn’t the most eye-catching I’ve tested, owing to its big, silver electrodes and an oversized display that comes across as a bit garish. While weight is easy to make out, the six additional statistics showcased are difficult to read, all displayed simultaneously. I like the Arboleaf app better than the scale, where five more metrics can be found in addition to the seven above, each featuring a helpful explanation when tapping on it. It’s a solid deal at this price, but the upsell to get an “intelligent interpretation report” for an extra $40 per year is probably safe to skip.
Hume Health Body Pod for $183: Hume Health’s Body Pod, another full-body scanner with handles, is heavily advertised—at least to the apps on my phone—and touted (by Hume) as the Next Big Thing in the world of body management. While the app is indeed glossy and inviting, I was shocked to discover how flimsy the hardware felt, that it lacked Wi-Fi, and that some features are locked behind a $100-a-year Hume Plus subscription plan. It works fine enough, but you can get results that are just as good with a cheaper device.
Garmin Index S2 for $191: Five years after its release, the Index S2 is still Garmin’s current model, a surprise for a company otherwise obsessed with fitness. It’s still noteworthy for its lovely color display, which walks you through its six body metrics (for up to 16 users) with each weigh-in. The display also provides your weight trend over time in graphical form and can even display the weather. The scale connects directly to Wi-Fi and Garmin’s cloud-based storage system, so you don’t need a phone nearby to track your progress, as with Bluetooth-only scales. A phone running the Garmin Connect app (Android, iOS) is handy, so you can keep track of everything over time. Unfortunately, as health apps go, Connect is a bit of a bear, so expect a learning curve—especially if you want to make changes to the way the scale works. You can turn its various LCD-screen widgets on or off in the app, but finding everything can be difficult due to the daunting scope of the Garmin ecosystem. The color screen is nice at first, but ultimately adds little to the package.
Omron BCM-500 for $92: With its large LCD panel, quartet of onboard buttons, and oversize silver electrodes, the Omron BCM-500 is an eye-catching masterwork of brutalist design. If your bathroom is decked out in concrete and wrought iron, this scale will fit right in. The Bluetooth unit syncs with Omron’s HeartAdvisor app (Android, iOS), but it provides all six of its body metrics directly on the scale, cycling through them with each weigh-in (for up to four users). It can be difficult to read the label for each of the data points, in part because the LCD isn’t backlit, but the app is somewhat easier to follow, offering front-page graphs of weight, skeletal muscle, and body fat. On the other hand, the presentation is rather clinical, and the app is surprisingly slow to sync. For a scale without a Wi-Fi connection, it’s rather expensive too.
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