Imagine your phone battery has died. But no worries...you only need to plug it in for 30 seconds to fully recharge! Now, imagine if the key to this super quick charge was available using something you might already have in your home. According to new research, the key to powering the future is at the tip of our pencils.

Okay, so graphene isn't exactly the same as graphite. From a physics perspective, graphite is many layers of graphene mixed with clay and other binders, while graphene is just a single atomic layer. But when graphene was discovered as a power source a few years ago, it earned two University of Manchester researchers a Nobel Prize. Since then, UCLA researchers Ric Kaner and Maher El-Kady have expanded on that work and set out to create a simple way to extract the graphene so it's usable for new applications.

Check out their results in this video:

The researchers predict a future where this work could be used to charge electric cars in one minute and eradicate batteries as we know them today.

(Photo Credit: Dvortygirl via Flickr's Creative Commons)