Researchers from Rice University have cooked up a rather interesting and promising battery technology capable of turning any surface into a lithium-ion battery. The technology consists of five spray-painted layers that make up all the components of a traditional battery, including two current collectors, a cathode, an anode, and a polymer separator in the middle. All that remains is a power source, and as the researchers demonstrated, spray-paintable batteries can be combined with solar cells.

Hewlett-Packard has agreed to pay a civil penalty of $425,000 to settle allegations that it knowingly failed to report to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) that certain lithium-ion battery packs contained a defect or otherwise created an unreasonable risk or serious injury or death, the CPSC announced this week. The battery packs in question are prone to overheating and pose a fire and burn hazard.

There's never a convenient time for your notebook to run out of juice when you're on the road, yet somehow the low battery indicator always manages to pop up at the worst possible moment. Like after boarding a cross-country flight, as opposed to five minutes ago when you sat in the terminal right next to a power outlet. Nvidia's Optimus technology won't prevent such a scenario from playing out altogether, but it does offer a bit of insurance against Murphy's Law, giving you more time in between charges by intelligently switching between integrated and discrete graphics depending on the load. And it's now available on Maingear's Clutch-15 notebook series.