It's really excited, Neil, because it's for letting batteries.

And so he's gone on a battery safari.

Some of you know that Neal is a motorcyclist.

He has an electric motor cycle, which, in the owner of the Nobel Prize he brought into the land.

How did you find out?

Well, I had planned to watch it live, but I was actually working this morning and forgot about the announcement.

So somebody came into my office very excitedly telling me the finally, that the lithium mine people had got the price.

It's been awarded to the people who really made lithium ion batteries what they are today and gave us the kind of devices we we all take for granted.

The batteries on this motorbike, our little Mayan batteries.

But they're not what they seem.

If you look inside them, a Neil started in the excitement, taking it to bits to show us what's inside.

You'll find there is a whole stack of many, many little my own batteries, and the key point about these batteries is that they are small.

They have a lot of energy in them on Dhe.

They're very light.

The reason there lots of batteries is because you'd battery is about four votes on dhe.

To drive a motorcycle engine with enough power, you need a much higher voltage, so you'll have a whole series of batteries in Siri's.

This is much more efficient than low voltage, where you need very thick wires to take the big current.

The way a battery works is effectively it's shuttles electrons from the negative electrode to a positive electrode in the batteries that were developed by the prize winners.

You have lithium atoms that release electrons, and those electrons travel through a wire power powering our phone or whatever is at the same time.

The lithium ions that are released travel through an electrolyte and then re combined with the electrons at the other side.

Neal decided he would try and find a list in battery, which he could take to bits.

The first battery had found had lithium written on it, but it was an old fashioned battery, which not using modern litum.

I am technology, it said litem.

Fine.

I'll chloride.

None of us actually know how it works, except it's not the right sort as he was sewing it open.

He got really quite a nasty rip of some gas.

Probably the time I'll chloride.

But this didn't stop Neal taking it to bits and throwing it into water.

Stanley was looking up materials that could, as we say, enter curate the lithium.

So when the lithium travels through the electrolyte during the battery operation, it inter Kalay ts into the positive electrode.

So he was developing materials that could capture this lithium afterward, was released and then re release it when we recharge the battery.

What happened subsequently?

Waas that good enough found a material that was better at reversible e catching this lithium on releasing it.

The early batteries contain lithium metal, which is very highly reactive.

So one of the developments that then came later on, which is really the kind of third part of the prize, if you like, is that we realized that we could use graphite to actually Hell's lithium when the battery's fully charged.

So rather news, a piece of lithium, which gets oxidized or releases its electrons.

We use graphite in which the lithium is stored, and that kind of stabilizes the lithium atoms So finally, in desperation, Neil offered to sacrifice one of the spare batteries from his mobile phone.

The phone only cost me or £5.

That's about $6 and it had £5 of free calls on it.

So it was a pretty good bargain.

Ah, nde.

When he started opening the battery, he cut it in half on Dhe.

Using a knife, he short circuited the two electrodes and new concede the sparks, which show the amount of energy that must be in there.

He then started unwrapping it, and I think this particular batteries quite complicated.

It will have, obviously, the material for both the cathode that's the positive electrode and the anode, the negative one.

But none of us could work out exactly what it was.

Neil had wrecked it, pulling it apart.

But some of them fizzed, which suggested possibly that there was some lithium there.

But it might just have bean electrolysis of the water.

We've been following the Nobel Prize for many years now.

How do you feel that this one?

This thing's like a good chemistry one?

This time I think it's really good.

First of all, it's chemistry.

Secondly, it really fulfills no bells original will that the price should be for something that is really useful to humanity.

Energy efficient batteries, batteries the delight and store.

A lot of energy are really important for decompensate izing our life, allowing us to use energy but without discharging so much.

See you two into the atmosphere.

I guess one of the things that this prize might do is in the wider community or in the public is perhaps get people excited about batteries and then we can tell people about the new type of batteries chemistries that are coming along.

One of the things that we're working on at the minute is trying to move towards what we called beyond lithium ion.

So this is the next generation of batteries.

These are the ones that will store much more energy than a lithium ion battery.

Could be more potentially.

Yeah, Yeah, I might still be in with a chance.

And then he plunged the burning lithium into the beaker.