The Battery That Refused to Die: The Story of Mya Le Thai
Mya Le Thai was tired of batteries dying.
Not just her phone battery—though that was annoying enough. She was frustrated by something much bigger: the fundamental flaw that has haunted every battery ever made. No matter how advanced they are, they all degrade. They all die. And when they do, they leave behind mountains of toxic waste.
In 2015, Thai was a doctoral chemistry student at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focused on improving capacitors, devices that store electrical charge. The work was highly technical, slow, and often frustrating—the kind of research where progress comes in tiny steps, if at all.
One day, she decided to try something different.
She took gold nanowires—wires thousands of times thinner than a human hair—and coated them with manganese dioxide, a material known for excellent electrical properties. Then she added something unusual: a layer of PMMA gel, a polymer similar to Plexiglas.
This experiment wasn’t part of her official research plan. There was no grant proposal for it. No expectation of success.
She was, in her own words, “just playing around.”
Thai began testing the gel-coated nanowires by repeatedly charging and discharging them.
Once.
Twice.
A thousand times.
Still working.
Five thousand cycles passed. Typical lithium-ion batteries—the kind in phones, laptops, and electric cars—begin to noticeably degrade after 300 to 500 cycles. Even the very best rarely survive more than 5,000 or 6,000 cycles.
Thai kept going.
10,000 cycles.
20,000 cycles.
50,000 cycles.
The battery wasn’t degrading.
She brought the results to her supervisor, Dr. Reginald Penner, Chair of UC Irvine’s Chemistry Department.
He didn’t believe her.
“We thought it might be a mistake,” Penner later admitted. Batteries aren’t supposed to behave like this. Degradation is considered unavoidable. The materials expand, contract, crack, and eventually fail. That’s just how physics works.
Except this battery didn’t get the memo.
The tests continued.
100,000 cycles.
150,000 cycles.
After three months of nonstop testing, the team finally stopped at 200,000 complete charge–discharge cycles.
Not because the battery failed.
But because they had proven their point.
The battery showed no significant capacity loss. After 200,000 cycles, it still worked almost like new.
“That was crazy,” Penner said, “because these things typically die in dramatic fashion after 5,000 or 6,000 cycles at most.”
To understand how extraordinary this was, consider this:
If your phone battery lasted 200,000 cycles instead of 500, you could fully charge and discharge it every single day for 547 years before it began to degrade.
The same battery.
Five centuries.
So what had Mya Le Thai discovered?
The secret lay in the gel coating.
Gold nanowires and manganese dioxide are excellent for conducting and storing electricity—but they are incredibly fragile. At the nanoscale, repeated charging causes materials to expand and contract. Over time, they crack and fall apart. This physical breakdown is the real reason batteries die.
Thai’s PMMA gel acted like a flexible shield.
It allowed the nanowires to move, stretch, and contract without breaking—like wrapping something delicate in elastic instead of glass.
“The coated electrode holds its shape much better,” Thai explained. “We can pass electricity through these nanowires hundreds of thousands of times.”
The implications were staggering.
Environmental Impact
Every year, the United States alone discards about 3 billion batteries. Worldwide, that number exceeds 15 billion. These batteries contain toxic materials—lithium, cobalt, lead, cadmium—that leak into soil and water.
“The goal is to make it so that it doesn’t degrade,” Thai said, “so we can save materials and save resources.”
If batteries lasted the lifetime of devices—or longer—battery waste could be reduced by up to 99%.
Potential Applications
- Smartphones: One battery for your entire life
- Laptops: No replacements, ever
- Electric vehicles: Batteries that outlast the car
- Medical implants: Pacemakers lasting decades longer
- Renewable energy: Grid storage batteries operating for centuries
In April 2016, Thai and Penner published their findings in ACS Energy Letters. The story exploded across the internet.
“A battery that lasts 400 times longer!”
“Student accidentally solves battery degradation!”
“Never replace your phone battery again!”
The excitement was real—and justified.
So why, years later, isn’t this battery in your phone?
Because breakthroughs in the lab don’t instantly become products.
There were major challenges:
- Manufacturing scale: Gold nanowires are difficult and expensive to produce in large quantities
- Cost: Gold isn’t cheap
- Energy density: The battery lasts incredibly long but stores less energy than lithium-ion
- Infrastructure: Entire industries are built around lithium-ion technology
“These aren’t impossible problems,” Penner said. “They’re engineering problems.”
As of 2024, research continues at UC Irvine and elsewhere. The technology shows particular promise in areas like grid storage, where longevity matters more than compact size. Consumer electronics are still a work in progress.
But the breakthrough itself is undeniable.
Mya Le Thai proved that battery degradation is not inevitable. She showed that with the right materials and the right protection, batteries don’t have to die.
“This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime,” she said, “and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality.”
The road from discovery to everyday use is long. But Thai opened a door that battery science once believed was permanently locked.
She showed that batteries don’t have to last years.
They can last centuries.
All because one student decided to “play around” in a lab.
And in doing so, accidentally changed how we think about the future of energy.
