Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 13

• Designing a Safer Battery for Smartphones (That Won’t Catch Fire): Mike Zimmerman likes to shock his guests by using a hammer to drive a nail through a solid polymer lithium metal battery. Nothing happens — and that’s a good thing. Mr. Zimmerman’s battery is a new spin on lithium-ion batteries, which are widely used in products from smartphones to cars. Today’s lithium-ion batteries, as anyone who has followed Samsung’s recent problems with flammable smartphones may know, can be ticking time bombs. The liquids in them can burst into flames if there is a short circuit of some sort. And driving a nail into one of them is definitely not recommended. With that in mind, Mr. Zimmerman’s demonstration commands attention. His Woburn, Mass., start-up, Ionic Materials, is at the cutting edge of an effort to design safer batteries. The company is working on “solid” lithium polymer batteries that greatly reduce their combustible nature.“My dream is to create the holy grail of solid batteries,” Mr. Zimmerman said. After four years of development, he believes he is nearly there and hopes to begin manufacturing within the next two years. Ionic Materials is one of a new wave of academic and commercial research efforts in the United States, Europe and Asia to find safer battery technologies as consumers demand more performance from phones and cars. In the last year, Seeo and Sakti, rival United States solid polymer battery makers, have been acquired by the German industrial firm Bosch and the British vacuum maker Dyson.

• Bose gets into the hearing aid headphone business: When you’ve got a punny name as good as “Hearphones” (no Google, I did not mean “headphones”) in the chamber, you owe it to the world to deliver product. For Bose, the emerging space of hearing-assisting headphones was the perfect place for that fun bit of word play. The company’s newly unveiled earbuds seem to occupy a similar spot as a number of emerging bits of hardware, including Nuheara’s IQbuds, which we described as a cross between a headphone and a hearing aid when we saw them a while back. Ditto for the Hear One and Sony’s MDR-1000x noise canceling headphones, which were unveiled back at IFA. Bose didn’t do a big announcement this time out, like it did with its new pairs of QuietComforts earlier in the year, instead opting for a soft unveiling, along with some in-person trials, which are running between now and the 15th at its Framingham, Massachusetts headquarters.