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What if your cell phone didn't come with a battery? Imagine, instead, if the material from which your phone was built was a battery. The promise of strong load-bearing materials that can also work as batteries represents something of a holy grail for engineers. And in a letter published online in Nano Letters last week, a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University describes what it says is a breakthrough in turning that dream into an electrocharged reality. The researchers etched nanopores into silicon layers, which were infused with a polyethylene oxide-ionic liquid composite and coated with an atomically thin layer of carbon. In doing so, they created small but strong supercapacitor battery systems, which stored electricity in a solid electrolyte, instead of using corrosive chemical liquids found in traditional batteries.