Since the first prototype made its debut in 2000, rechargeable magnesium batteries have continued to be both technologically attractive and commercially out of reach. The attraction arises from magnesium’s advantages over lithium: it is 1000 times more abundant in Earth’s crust and is chemically less hazardous. The unrealized commercialization is largely down to the difficulty in identifying a material to serve as an effective and robust cathode. Tomoya Kawaguchi of Tohoku University in Japan and his collaborators may now have solved that problem through their demonstration of a material that satisfies one of the most important requirements of a good cathode: it can reversibly accept and release ions over repeated charging cycles [1].
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