The U.S. Dept. of Energy has set a goal to develop battery and energy storage technologies that are five times more powerful and five times cheaper than today’s within five years. To accomplish this, U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu is taking some lesson from U.S. history. The DOE is creating a new Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, at a cost of $120 million over five years, that’s intended to reproduce development environments that were successfully used by Bell Laboratories in the World War II Manhattan Project that produced an atomic bomb. Read the full story at ComputerWorld.