That's Pascal behind me, and Bill took the photo, at March's Cafe Scientifique. We learnt how the current lithium ion batteries in phones, laptops etc. were invented in Oxford in the 80s and commercialized by Sony in the early 90s.

The speaker is working at Bath Uni on the next generation of batteries, to be used for powering cars. He's a chemist that uses computer models to investigate the properties of materials.

I was astonished to learn that ions can pass through a solid. Faraday wrote about it, how come I didn't know until now? Actually I was away the day they did ions in chemistry and I've never been entirely comfortable with them.