Since 2012, Stefan Freunberger of the Institute for Chemistry and Technology of Materials at TU Graz has been working on development of a new generation of batteries with enhanced performance and longer useful lives, and which are also cheaper to produce than current models. He believes that lithium-oxygen batteries have significant potential. In 2017, in the course of his work, Freunberger uncovered parallels between cell aging in living organisms and in batteries. In both cases, highly reactive singlet oxygen is responsible for the aging process. This form of oxygen, which has been the focus of Freunberger’s research over the past few years, is produced when lithium-oxygen batteries are charged or discharged. The Graz-based researcher has now found ways to minimise the negative effects of singlet oxygen, and his findings have been published in renowned journals Nature Communications and Angewandte Chemie.