Everyone agrees that a see-through smartphone would be pretty nifty. Maybe even practical: It could conceivably be mounted on a windshield or visor. The problem has always been the battery. Smartphones need a pretty large one in relation to their overall size, and the components that make up a battery just don’t come in a transparent form.

Working together, Stanford professor Yi Cui and student Yuan Yang got around this problem by creating a mesh of battery electrodes ^[1] with strands less than 50 microns thick. “When a human being looks at an object that’s smaller than 50 microns, it’s not visible. That’s how we make it transparent,” Cui explained to SmartPlanet.

Next stop, see-through iPhone? Stay tuned.

Read more, and see a video, at SmartPlanet ^[1].