Flat Battery Fix

Cellphones should be ideal for making emergency calls during a power cut, but if the battery runs flat, you’re stuck. Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry suggests that linking several cellphones will muster enough battery power to make a call.

The idea exploits a feature that all cellphones share: they shut down before they lose all power. This keeps irreversible chemical changes from ruining the battery. The Institute wants all future cellphone batteries to have an extra pair of standard-sized electrical contacts which will allow them to be linked in an emergency, and it has designed a connector to do the job.