iPhone X Pre-Order Supplies Sell Out, Shipping Estimates Slip Drastically [Update: 5 to 6 Weeks]

Pre-order supplies of the new iPhone X are now largely sold out, with the new iPhone models displaying shipping estimates well beyond the November 3 launch date. All models from all carriers at the moment list shipping estimates of five to six weeks in the United States, although some Sprint models can still be ordered for November 3 in-store pickup depending on the store. Other countries have similarly delayed shipping estimates.

Ahead of iPhone X pre-orders, rumors suggested supplies would be heavily constrained due to ongoing production issues with everything from the TrueDepth camera module to the flexible printed circuit board for the device’s antenna.

With pre-order supplies of the iPhone X exhausted, some customers could be waiting for months to get their hands on one of Apple’s new devices. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes Apple will not reach supply/demand balance for the iPhone X until well into the new year.

Apple began accepting pre-orders for the iPhone X at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday, October 27, and it took just minutes for shipping estimates to start slipping. Shipping times are likely to get longer over the course of the next few hours as pre-orders continue to trickle in.

Customers who are hoping to get an iPhone X on launch day but weren’t able to get a pre-order in early enough can try their luck waiting in line for a new device on launch day, Friday November 3.

Customers who were able to place an early iPhone X pre-order will begin receiving their devices starting next week.

Related Roundup: iPhone XBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Buy Now)
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Apple Adds New 12-inch MacBook Leather Sleeve to Online Accessory Store

During today’s global Apple Store downtime in preparation for iPhone X pre-orders, Apple quietly added a new Leather Sleeve for the 12-inch MacBook to its Mac Accessories store section.

Costing $149, the leather sleeve with soft microfiber lining is available in Saddle Brown and Midnight Blue colors. The case can also be twinned with Apple’s iPhone X Leather Case ($49), also available in Saddle Brown and Midnight Blue.

The Leather Sleeve for 12-inch MacBook currently ships in 1 business day at the time of writing.

Tag: Apple Store
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Former Xbox Live policy VP Stephen ‘StepTo’ Toulouse passed away

Stephen “StepTo” Toulouse, a tech vet, humorist and author well known for his role in managing Xbox Live over the years has passed away. His brother Jeff Toulouse tweeted that “It is with heavy hearts that we announce the loss of our brother, Stephen Toulouse, @Stepto, this morning.” A Microsoft employee for nearly 18 years, Stephen served as director of Xbox Live policy and enforcement until early 2012 and helped shape the company’s response to issues online communities are still struggling to deal with.

Reddit adjusted its policies to deal with material that “encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence” while dumping the /Nazi board earlier this week, and Twitter has only lately decided to strengthen similar policies. In 2010 Toulouse explained to an Xbox Live gamer why a swastika was already a bannable offense there, saying “If you think the swastika symbol should be re-evaluated by societies all over the Earth, I think that’s great. Your Xbox Live profile or in game logo, which doesn’t have the context to explain your goal, is not the right place to do that.”

He also created “StepTo’s Law” of ban protests which read as follows:

“The more convoluted, overwrought and lengthy the protest of innocence, the probability of it being bullshit approaches one.”

Software engineer Brianna Wu tweeted about Toulouse that “I can think of no better way to honor @stepto than for him to be remembered as one of the first, hardest fighting activists on harassment.”

The greater your agitation that women are getting more attention in society the probability of you being a misogynistic asshole approaches 1

— Stephen Toulouse (@Stepto) April 8, 2016

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the loss of our brother, Stephen Toulouse, @Stepto, this morning. Beloved son, brother and uncle.

— Jeff Toulouse (@toulouto) October 27, 2017

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the loss of our brother, Stephen Toulouse, @Stepto, this morning. Beloved son, brother and uncle.

— Jeff Toulouse (@toulouto) October 27, 2017

RIP, Stephen @stepto Toulouse. I am thunderstruck. https://t.co/iNiZcaGl7e

— John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 27, 2017

RIP my friend. I shall miss you very much 😢 https://t.co/IlROlV947l

— Larry Hryb📍#NYC (@majornelson) October 27, 2017

So many memories of @stepto. I’ll never forget all the good times at Xbox, or our dogs growing up together at our favorite dog park. pic.twitter.com/mwsJts5UTZ

— Eric Neustadter (e) (@thevowel) October 27, 2017

Source: Stepto.com

Saudi Arabia plans $1 billion investment in Virgin’s space tourism

Richard Branson has gained a powerful and extremely wealthy ally that can make his space tourism dreams a reality: Saudi Arabia. The kingdom will invest $1 billion in the Virgin Group’s space companies and might even add $480 million more in the future. Saudi’s investment will fund three companies within the Virgin Group, starting with Virgin Galactic, which is responsible for developing the VSS Unity (also known as SpaceShipTwo) designed to fly paying tourists to suborbital space. Part of the money will also go to The Spaceship Company and Virgin Orbit. The former manufactures Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft, while the latter provides launch services for small satellites.

In a letter he published regarding the investment, Branson said Saudi’s contribution will enable Virgin “to develop the next generation of human spaceflight, more economic satellite launches and accelerate [its] program for trans-continental point-to-point space travel.” The investment still has to go through US regulatory clearances, but he takes it as “a sign of confidence from the international investment community” that its vision is the right path to commercializing access to space. More importantly, Sir Branson has revealed that Virgin Galactic is merely months away from sending people into space.

Although Saudi’s contribution will come from the country’s Public Investment Funds, Virgin will remain based in the US. The partnership could lead to the development of a space-centric center in Saudi Arabia, though — Virgin even commissioned an artist to draw a render of the futuristic facility, which you can see in the image above.

Source: CNBC, Virgin Galactic (1), (2)

You shot the perfect photo. Here’s how to get the perfect print

Now that we all walk around with high-resolution cameras in our pockets (i.e., our smartphones), people are taking more photos than ever before. But rarely do we turn our digital images into prints, let alone put the time and effort into printing the correct way. This is too bad. Not only does a print allow you to better appreciate your photographs, but we also have the technology today to make the best prints possible, turning your home office into a professional photo lab.

Digital Trends recently spoke with Adobe’s director of Experience Design, Matthew Richmond, about how to print digital photos at home that look great every time. From file type to color management and paper selection, the path to producing great art starts with a lot of science. If you’ve tried printing at home and been frustrated by inaccurate color or brightness, don’t throw away your photo printer — the solution to your problem is likely below. And for anyone who hasn’t yet made the plunge and bought a good printer, we’ve got a good place to start.

Why does my print look different from the screen?

The most confounding issue when it comes to making your own prints is the inevitable mismatch between what you see on your computer screen and what you see on the print. Shadows come out too dark, reds look orange, what have you. In truth, this doesn’t have to be inevitable.

“The challenge of making a great, bright, color-accurate print is a journey that starts with two primary questions,” Richmond told us. “One, are the colors you see on the screen actually what you think they are? Two, is the printer set up to accurately reproduce the colors on the screen?”

While there are standards for calibrating computer screens, many monitors aren’t adjusted to them at the factory. The reasons for this can vary, but it probably boils down to what a photographer needs versus what a marketing department thinks consumers want. Monitors often boast about how impressively bright they can get (some say manufacturers are trying to fool you), but a display set to its maximum brightness is rarely good for photography. Judge exposure on a screen that’s too bright and you might adjust your image to make it darker, leading to a print that is much too dark.

From file type to managing colors to paper type, the path to producing great art starts with a lot of science.

While brightness is relatively easy to fix, color is a much trickier issue. Even if a monitor is properly calibrated at the factory, its color will shift over time.

“Color calibration should be an essential part of any digital imaging workflow,” Richmond said. “Otherwise, it is impossible to tell whether the colors displayed are truly accurate.”

While there are built-in tools for calibrating your screen by eye, Richmond explained the only truly accurate solution is to use a hardware colorimeter, such as those from X-Rite and Datacolor. These devices rest against your screen and measure the hue, saturation, and luminance of specific color patches and then create a monitor profile that tells your graphics card how to adjust its output to display the proper color. It may sound complex, but the software handles everything more-or-less automatically, which can make using a colorimeter far simpler (and more accurate) than calibrating manually.

That still sounds too complex (and expensive) for me…

If you’d rather not bother calibrating your monitor (you should, but we get it, not everyone is going to), there are still a couple steps you can take to make sure your prints look good.

First, you can’t rely on your eyes. If you adjust color and brightness to your taste on an improperly calibrated monitor, you might just be wasting time. Instead, rely as much as possible on data. Looking at the histogram in Lightroom in Photoshop can quickly tell you if an image is over or underexposed, and you can make adjustments accordingly without clipping your shadows or highlights.

If there is something in the image you know is supposed to be white or neutral gray, you can use Lightroom’s auto white balance tool to accurately set the white balance, but try to set white balance by eye and you could end up way off in the print.

Next, make sure to download paper profiles from the manufacturer of the paper you use. In the case of first-party papers, like those from Epson and Canon, the profiles are likely already built in to the printer. But any good third-party paper manufacturer will make their profiles available for download (here is Moab’s, Hahnemühle’s, Canson’s, and Red River’s).

A paper profile is to your printer what a monitor profile is to your GPU: It lets the printer know how that particular paper is going to react to the ink so that the printer knows how to put it down. Papers differ in various ways, from the quality of the surface (e.g., luster or matte) to their actual color gamut (the range of colors they are able to reproduce), so using the proper profile is important.

For the best results, print from an application that has the option to manage printer colors, like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom. This is where you can select third-party printer profiles.

Using the right profile for your combination of printer and paper doesn’t mean your prints will automatically look like your monitor, but it does reduce the number of variables in the equation. If you make a test print and, say, it comes out too dark, you know the error is in your display. You can make a simple brightness adjustment to the image to fix it.

Okay, cool, but I’m just going to send my images to a lab.

Great! We understand not everyone wants to invest or bother with owning and operating a photo printer, but that doesn’t change the importance of the above steps.

Tom Grill/JGI/Getty Images

A photo lab, at least one worth its salt, should offer profiles for the printers and papers it uses. You can download these profiles and use them to soft proof your images on your home computer, so you have an idea of what to expect (assuming you have a calibrated monitor).

What file type should I use to print?

For best results, you should shoot in RAW and stick with an uncompressed image format throughout the editing pipeline, like TIFF or PSD. A JPEG will take up much less space, but Richmond cautions you should avoid using the format for print.

“JPEG files, and even PNG files, are designed to be compact and portable,” he told Digital Trends. “By definition, they do not store the same wonderful depth of information as the file formats most creatives use for ‘working.’ Exporting an image as a JPEG will most often result in a file with less color depth and detail.”

“I have seen great looking prints happen as low as 120ppi.”

So what if your camera isn’t capable of shooting RAW, or you had it set to JPEG and it’s too late? The trick is to make sure you don’t degrade file quality any further. Using a program like Lightroom can take the JPEG from the camera through the entire editing process without having to worry, since Lightroom is nondestructive.

If you want to export it to work with in another editing application, like Photoshop, you should still choose TIFF or PSD (or open the original JPEG). This won’t magically make the image more detailed, but it will guarantee that all of the information that’s in the original JPEG remains in the image, whereas saving a new JPEG will recompress an already compressed image, resulting in more quality loss.

What resolution do I need to make a good print?

In cameras, we generally talk about resolution in terms of megapixels. When it comes time to print, however, we have to think about pixels per inch, or PPI. More is generally better, but it’s not that simple. Larger prints are typically viewed from greater distances, so you may be able to get away which a much lower PPI in those cases.

“The standard go-to resolution is 300ppi,” said Richmond. “Depending on the type of artwork, printer, paper, and so on, I have seen great looking prints happen as low as 120ppi.”

Marc Pfitzenreuter/Getty Images

You can determine the maximum print size for a specific PPI with some simple math. Let’s say you have a 24-megapixel camera, so that’s 6,000 × 4,000 pixels, and you want to see how big you can print at 300ppi. Just divide 6,000 pixels by 300ppi and you get 20 inches. If you’re OK dropping to 200ppi, you can push that to 30 inches, while 120ppi will take you all the way 50 inches.

“Honor the information density that you have,” said Richmond. “It’s fine if the best you have is lower than 300ppi, just understand that the image will start to fall apart if the resolution gets too low.”

So, like, is matte or glossy paper better?

Ah, the answer is so much more wonderfully complex than the question. One of the best reasons to do your own printing at home is the sheer number of different papers that are available to choose from, with myriad surfaces that go far beyond matte and glossy.

There is no one “best” paper, so this is where your personal preference will come into play. Richmond believes you should approach the search for the right paper as empirically as possible.

“My advice is always to approach printing like a scientist,” he said. “Try every pack of paper samples from Epson/Canon, Moab, Hahnemühle, Red River, and so on. Find a great printer evaluation file [like the ones from Onsight] or make your own (with the color bars). Use reference prints and test prints to tweak and truly define the desired result before you hit print on that limited edition of large, beautiful prints.”

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Ready for new wheels? Here is how to sell a car quickly and at a good price

All great things come to an end, and that could include the ownership of your current automobile. If you’re worried about the difficulty of trying to sell your car, however, fret no more. It’s not at all a difficult process and by following our quick how-to, you will hopefully be able to sell your ride in no time.

The most important thing to remember when selling your automobile is putting yourself in your potential buyer’s shoes. That way, you can use your own judgment to determine what you think is a good or a bad car ad. Then, you can base the quality of your own ad off this perception.

Conveying transparency and honesty as a seller is key in order to win the trust of potential buyers. It also increases the chance of you getting the most dollar for your car. Being familiar with your automobile’s make and model, its current value based on its condition and mileage, and its service and ownership history are all important things to know, both in your ad and in conversations with potential buyers.

Getting started

Step 1: Verify your make and model as well as the year. The easiest way to do this is to find your vehicle identification number (VIN), which is generally located where the dashboard meets the windshield on the driver’s side (if it is not there, open the driver’s door and inspect the area where the door latches when closed). After you’ve found the number, use one of the many free VIN decoders on the internet.

VIN number

Step 2: Scope out your market. Find other cars similar to yours and in equal condition. Cross-check the book value and any other market research you find on your vehicle’s pricing, and thanks to various sources such as Kelly Blue Book and National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), car values are easy to look up. Hop on any of those sites, choose your vehicle, choose its condition based on their descriptions, report the car’s current mileage, check any special options the car might have, and let the guides do their work.

Where it gets tricky is if you have an older, rarer, or more specialized vehicle, such as a collector. For instance, several years ago, Kelly Blue Book valued a clean collector’s BMW 850CSI, a very rare high-performance luxury GT coupe from the 1990s, at $15,000-$20,000 in good condition. However, the 850CSI doesn’t quite follow book value because of its collectible status and rarity. With only 225 being imported into North America, none were to be found for less than $50,000.

This is why gauging your market is so important. Look at similar vehicles in your areas listed at near-equal condition, cross-check that with the book value, and you have your ballpark asking price.

Step 3: Gather any documents or knowledge that you can of your ownership history. That way you can chronicle any service you conducted on the vehicle. These details include whether or not you changed the oil on time according to the car’s factory service manual, whether the vehicle was in an accident, or if you had a particular part replaced.

Step 4: Take lots of pictures. Got some road rash on the hood from driving 15,000 miles per year for the last three years? Photograph it! Got a rip in the driver’s seat? Photograph it. Take care of your car so much that it looks like new? Photograph it! You want to entice buyers to your car, so don’t forget to wash and detail your vehicle before you take pictures of it. No potential buyer wants to see a dirty car for sale. Even if its a beater, try and clean it up as best as you can. Exceptions are if it really is a pile and is being sold “as-is.”

Step 5: Consider what outlets you would like to sell your vehicle on. In today’s internet age, it’s easy to open a listing on Autotrader, Cars.com, eBay Motors, or Craigslist. Here are our picks for the best used car sites on the web. Again, depending on your vehicle, you want to focus your sale on the market that has the most potential. Have a classic Porsche 928? You will want to poke around the hugely active online Porsche communities to see if you can score any bites first because you’re most likely to get more attention if you concentrate on the same crowd that enthuses about your car in the first place.

Crafting your ad

Step 6: Start concocting your car ad. You can browse your local Craigslist to find good examples, but the basic rule is to be as thorough and specific as you can. Did you travel away on sabbatical for a year and it sat at your parents’ house for that time, hardly seeing use? Say that! Have a perfect service history? Include that, and if you can, take a picture of all the receipts sprawled out on your dinner table. Shoddy and sloppy car ads feature few words in the description, little indication of the car’s history, and bad photos. Aim for the opposite and you will be in better shape than most.

There is also nothing wrong with listing your vehicle on multiple sites (and using copy-and-paste for your ad) to increase your exposure.

Step 7: Meet with potential buyers. It’s obviously best to do this in a safe, public place such as the local Starbucks, but any busy and popular locale will do.

Is the vehicle you are selling not road legal? No problem. Potential buyers will have to come to your personal residence to see the vehicle, so make sure you have a friend or two present for support just in case.

During the sale

Step 8: Complete the sale. Found a buyer who will give you what you’re asking for? Great! Ideally, you want to strive to sell your car for cash. That is the easiest and most confident way that you can get money for your vehicle. There are other methods such as PayPal, United States Postal Service-sanctioned money orders, or even a banker’s check. It’s all down to how you would like to handle the cash flow. To avoid any chance of being ripped off, always try and ask for straight cash. If the asking amount is too much to handle physical dollar bills, your second course of action would be a certified banker’s check, which the buyer can request at their local bank.

After the sale

Step 9: Double-check all of your legal documents. In most states, if the vehicle is owned outright, legal transfer of ownership and the ability to register your vehicle for public road use is dependent on a clear and physical title, the government document that makes the ownership of a car official. If the vehicle is financed or leased, you will have to consult either your dealership or the lien holder (bank who is loaning you the money to own that vehicle) as to the transfer of ownership.

If everything checks out and you’ve followed these tips, you will come out the other side several bills richer. Good luck and happy selling.

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Google confident Pixel 2 XL’s screen is fine, but extends warranty to 2 years

Why it matters to you

Got a Pixel 2 XL? Google will soon issue software updates to relieve concerns of screen burn in and will provide the option to boost saturation.

Google’s Pixel 2 XL smartphone received rave reviews, but it quickly hit a snag — a handful of reviewers and device owners encountered problems with the plastic OLED screen supplied by LG. After investigating the issue, Google’s Vice President of Product Management, Mario Queiroz, addressed the qualms in a post on Google’s community forums.

Screen burn-in, warranty extension

First off, the company is extending the Pixel 2 and 2 XL’s warranty to two years, rather than one. Google said it’s “very confident that the Pixel 2 delivers an exceptional smartphone experience,” and the decision to extend the warranty is to give people peace of mind.

This is likely due to one of the biggest concerns about the Pixel 2 XL’s POLED screen, which people claim is displaying signs of screen burn in. Burn-in is a problem that occurs when a static image, like the Android navigation keys, is permanently burned into the screen making it visible when it’s no longer supposed to be there. After downloading a gray image and hiding the navigation keys, we saw a faint outline of them on our review unit — though we had to squint and put our eyes to the screen to see it. The concern is how the Pixel 2 XL is already showing signs of burn-in early in its life, as it’s usually expected after quite some time of use.

“We’re currently testing a software update that further enhances protections against this issue.”

Google’s answer? The Pixel 2 XL screen “shows that its decay characteristics are similar to OLED panels used in comparable products.” Essentially, the burn-in is in line with what you’ll find on other high-end smartphones using OLED panels. Google said it should affect normal day-to-day user experience, but the company isn’t leaving it at that. A software update is incoming to mitigate the problem and maximize the life of the OLED panel. One of the examples how software already prevents burn-in is how the Always-on Display on the lock screen “moves the clock in a subtle zig-zag pattern on every minute boundary” to ensure the same pixels aren’t persistently lit up.

The update, which will come in a few weeks, will do two things: The Android navigation keys will “fade-out” after a short period of inactivity; the screen’s brightness will drop 50 nits, which Google said is “imperceptible,” but it will significantly reduce the load on the screen. Google is also working with more app developers to “use a light navigation bar to match their app’s color scheme.”

Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends

Pumping up the colors

One of the other complaints is the colors on the Pixel 2 XL, and how they’re far more muted than other Android smartphones. This was an intentional decision by Google to offer a more “natural  and accurate rendition of colors,” but Google added a “Vivid Colors” mode in its Settings that boosts the color saturation up 10 percent for people who wanted their colors to pop. The company did say that if it received requests for more saturated colors through feedback, it would consider adding an option via a software update — and since the Vivid Colors mode clearly wasn’t enough, Google is following through. Both the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL will get a new mode for more saturated colors in the next few weeks.

Chau goes into depth about how Android 8.0 Oreo and the Pixel 2 XL attempts to offer natural colors, as the author intended, instead of a saturated image as found in most OLED devices.

Both the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL will get a new mode for more saturated colors.

“Color mode is really a user choice,” Chau said. “Many users prefer accurate colors; others prefer more saturated colors. What we’ve found is that you can become acclimatized to either.”

Regardless, both phones will get a saturated color mode that will make the screen a little more like the original 2016 Pixel and Pixel XL. This will allow device owners to choose if they want a saturated screen or a display with more natural colors.

High-pitch frequency and clicking sound

Some Pixel 2 owners say they experience a high-pitch frequency and clicking sound when the phone is to the ear like on a call — when the screen is on and unlocked. Google said it discovered a bug with NFC functionality that was causing the issue, and said a fix is on the way. To temporary stop the problem, head over to Settings > Connected Devices > NFC to toggle it off.

There are a few other issues with the Pixel 2 XL’s screen Google did not comment about. Namely, the blue tint that’s visible when looking at the phone at an angle. We’ve seen it in our review unit, though we do not think it’s an issue in day-to-day use, much like the rest of the Pixel 2 XL screen’s problems. Some reviewers and Pixel 2 XL owners said they have blotchy, grainy screens too, though it looks like those phones may have come from a bad batch as people said they haven’t seen those issues after Google replaced their units.

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Google has a software fix for the Pixel 2 speaker ‘clicking’ problem

Can you hear it? Soon, you won’t anymore.

One of the stranger (and more innocuous) issues with the Pixel 2 has been an inconsistently bothersome “clicking” or “hissing” noise when holding the phone up to your ear for a phone call. Some people have it, others don’t, and those who do often don’t hear it consistently. Well, now Google has identified the actual issue and said a fix is on the way.

The issue, it turns out, is simple: it’s the NFC radio in the phone. A fix will roll out via a software update in a few weeks, addressing the problem on a system level. But Google says that in the meantime, turning off NFC will get rid of the issue. Annoying for sure, but great to know there’s something we can do right away to stop it before the full fix hits phones.

This surely isn’t a software change on the level of the Pixel 2 XL’s display, but it sure is something that’s annoying if you’re experiencing it and great to see Google addressing it quickly.

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Facebook’s new tools help build supportive Groups

Facebook has been steadily improving things for groups on the social network. The company added administration tools like membership insights for community pages. It also created Groups for Pages to let businesses, artists and brands create their own communities. It also shuttered a standalone Groups app in the hopes of bringing the functionality into the already existing Facebook app. Now the company is adding new features for groups to help build communities, including welcome posts, group-specific badges and member profiles. Group admins will also get new features like expanded insights and tips to help them manage contentious conversations and to know when is the best time to schedule posts.

The new tools are all aimed at making Facebook Groups a better place to be. A welcome post helps new members feel valued and appreciated from the first login to a specific community. Badges let you show your support and identify with your favorite community groups, while member profiles could help everyone get to know each other better. “Now, when group members click on another person’s name they will be directed to a group-specific profile,” Facebook said in a blog post, “based on publicly-available information like things they may share in common and a feed of that person’s activity in the group.”

If you’re an admin, Facebook knows it takes time to moderate groups so that everyone feels safe and supported. The new admin-specific tools let moderators remind members of the rules of conduct, temporarily turn off a member’s ability to post or comment and even remove members who violate these rules with a click. The new tips can help you figure out when to schedule posts as well as things to add, like location tags, to make your group even more useful to members. “We’ve learned so much from working with group admins already,” said Facebook, “and this is just the beginning. There’s a lot more work to be done and we look forward to continue building the tools they need to bring the world closer together.”

Source: Facebook

Researchers look deeply within batteries to see why they explode

High-energy batteries, like the ones in your laptop and smartphone, can fail, which can cause them to overheat and even catch fire. A team of researchers used cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) , a technique that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in chemistry, to capture high-resolution, atomic-level images finger-like growths in these devices called dendrites. The new images will give scientists a better idea of what causes high-energy batteries to overheat, which could lead to safer devices for all of us.

The research was conducted by scientists from Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The team captured the first-ever atomic-level images of dendrites, which can break through the barriers between different segments of a battery, which causes short circuits or fires. The cryo-EM images show lithium metal dendrites as long, six-sided crystals rather than the pitted, irregular shapes seen in earlier electron microscope imagery.

This technique lets researchers freeze batteries at any point in its charge-discharge cycle, remove various components, and see what’s happening on an atom-by-atom basis. They can then make stop-action movies of the activity with the different images they take, which provides previously-unheard of insight into the process going on inside a high-energy battery. The current team was able to see both dendrites and the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) coating on each one — controlling the SEI stability is important for efficient batteries.

“With cryo-EM, you can look at a material that’s fragile and chemically unstable and you can preserve its pristine state – what it looks like in a real battery ­– and look at it under high resolution,” said professor and research leader Yi Cui in a statement. “This includes all kinds of battery materials. The lithium metal we studied here is just one example, but it’s an exciting and very challenging one.”

Source: Science