Dunking a sheet of paper into an ink containing carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires can turn it into a battery, according to researchers at Stanford.

Yi Cui and colleagues say their new battery paper could replace the metallic parts of lithium-ion batteries and be a cheap solution for all your future battery needs. The paper product may have even wider uses in other electronic devices.

“By combining our paper-based energy storage with other types of devices developed, such as bioassays or displays on paper, full paper electronics could be realized in the future,” write the authors in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cui has previously created similar batteries using plastic, but the nano-ink adheres better to paper. In fact, it adheres so much that you can crumple up the paper and it will still function as a battery. Battery origami anyone?

A number of research teams are working on paper batteries. In fact, Nature’s Katharine Sanderson noted in 2007 that “small, flexible wafer-thin batteries made out of paper are the latest product of carbon-nanotube research”. Those batteries were made by dissolving cellulose – the stuff of paper – and reconstituting it, rather than simply soaking an off the shelf sheet of paper in a high tech ink.