18-year-old’s breakthrough invention can recharge phones in seconds

[Xithras]

29. She'd get her ass sued off if she tried.

Discussions about the newer graphene supercapacitors (which anyone can make with a graphite pencil and an old CD player) have been making the rounds among the science journals and blogs for the past year. Their potential to power everything from cellphones to electric cars have been widely discussed.

She didn't actually create a cellphone charger. She created a graphene supercapacitor and connected an LED to it...something that there are Youtube videos of OTHER experimenters already doing. Beyond that, she (and the media) are simply speculating as to its potential applications. She didn't invent it, and she has merely cited a potential application for it that has ALREADY been cited by others, meaning that it would fail any challenge based on "obviousness".

The technology was actually invented by a guy named Richard Kaner at UCLA, and was initially announced more than a year ago in an article published by the journal Science. I give her props for bringing more attention to the technology, and am impressed that a teenager could pull off a functional implementation of a bleeding edge energy storage device like this, but she didn't actually "invent" anything.