Whoop’s new fitness tracker is better thanks to a battery breakthrough
Fitness company Whoop has a new tracker that squishes five LEDs, four photodiodes, a pulse oximeter, skin temperature sensor, and more into a package that is 33 percent smaller than its predecessor - all while still offering five days of battery life. But a particular change to the tracker's battery chemistry is one of the biggest reasons Whoop was able to do all this in the first place.
The change was pioneered by a Silicon Valley company called Sila Nanotechnologies, which was co-founded in 2011 by Gene Berdichevsky, one of Tesla's earliest employees. And it's one that, if it scales up, could help break some of the biggest limitations currently facing lithium-ion technology.
On paper, it's a simple change: the battery's anode is now...