The Wall Street Journal reports that an Israeli start-up called StoreDot Ltd has developed an extremely fast smartphone charger. The company revealed its prototype charger, which for now works only with the Samsung Galaxy S4, in a video published at the start of this week. In the video you can see the S4’s battery level go from an in-the-red 25 per cent to a tip-top 100 per cent in about half a minute. That’s fast. If you have you ever watched your phone battery charging icon to see if you can detect progress it was a waste of time until this device was invented.

What is the technology behind StoreDot’s prototype? The team at the company are from the nanotechnology department at Tel Aviv University and they apply this knowledge and related cutting edge science to speed charging times. In particular StoreDot has developed “biological semiconductors, made from naturally occurring organic compounds called peptides, or short chains of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins,” to provide this battery charging speed boost – using its own battery design.

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