Batteries don't do so hot when it's cold.
If you live in a cooler climate, you may have noticed this in the form of your car refusing to start on a chilly morning, or your battery level plummeting on your phone while you stand on the train platform in the freezing cold.
But it's not the batteries' fault exactly.
It's not that technology works worse in the cold.
It's chemistry.
And that's a much harder problem to fix.
Batteries aren't just big buckets of negatively charged electrons, even though that's what moves through the wire when you plug a battery into something.
The electrons start as part of neutral atoms or molecules, and they're released by a chemical reaction inside the battery.
As a result of the reaction, electrons move through a wire and meet up with positively charged molecules on the other side of the battery.
That movement creates a current that powers your stuff.
