A LED flashlight powered by a battery made using five pennies.

Oops! Are we gonna get in trouble? In order to make our Five-Cent LED Battery we needed to sand the faces off 4 pennies. According to United States Code, TITLE 18, PART I, CHAPTER 17, § 331. Mutilation, diminution, and falsification of coins:

"Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States; or whoever fraudulently possesses, passes, utters, publishes, or sells, or attempts to pass, utter, publish, or sell, or brings into the United States, any such coin, knowing the same to be altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened— Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

Gulp! Fraudulently? I don’t think we did it "Fraudulently." (Ahem) And I just want to say for the record that we did not force anyone to deface currency of the United States. In fact, if pushed came to shove I will say that we discouraged the practice and in fact actually pleaded with everyone at the Exploratorium, hoodlums that they are, to come up with another means of making a Five-Cent battery. But they brazenly went forward, stopping only briefly to maniacally cackle and call me names like "Goody Two-shoes" and thumb their noses at me. Needless to say they shamelessly went ahead with their outlaw ways. Oh, they are bad to the bone! We were as innocent as you all out there. I tried to stop them! That's what I will say! That or I’ll say that the "pennies" we were using were actually fake "prop" pennies that we got at the local novelty shop. Either way, you can't prove anything!

Now, if you don't want to risk being outside the laws of the United States, the Exploratorium has put together quite a fun project list of fun things to do and make. To the best of my knowledge, the majority of them won't get you in trouble with the authorities. They can teach you things like how to make musical instruments out of normal household junk, how to make a bottle blast off or how to build a motorized toy that dances, using a recycled CD and a DC motor. Really cool stuff!

Be good out there and stay out of trouble.

Watch the Quest Lab: The Five-cent Battery television story online.

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The Tesla Roadster is an all-electric sports car you can buy today.

Plug-in hybrids run for a certain distance on batteries (so far, hackers have been able to create plug-in hybrids that run for about 10 miles on batteries). After that, they revert to standard hybrid operation, which uses gas and electricity. When you get home in the evening, you plug the car in and recharge the batteries so that the following day you can drive another 10 miles with the electric charge.

Today you can only get a plug-in hybrid by hacking your Prius to add more batteries to it. We filmed members of the Palo Alto nonprofit CalCars doing just this for our QUEST story on plug-in hybrids in 2007. If you're not handy with tools, you can have someone else retrofit your Prius with the necessary battery pack. Luscious Garage, in San Francisco, has started offering this service. They're featured in today’s QUEST story "Waiting for the Electric Car," which explores why all-electric everyday cars remain an elusive goal. The limiting factor is the difficulty in making a battery that is powerful, long-lasting and cheap. QUEST goes behind the scenes to a battery lab at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley to find out what goes into the making of a lithium-ion battery and why it’s taking so long to make one that can power an all-electric car, or even a plug-in hybrid that can go for more than 10 miles on its electric charge.

Watch the Waiting for the Electric Car television story online.

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