A Lemon-Powered Spaceship

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Fruit-powered batteries are the ultimate school science experiment, but they’re normally used to power a pocket calculator. This week’s listener wants to know if they could do more, and sends the team on a quest to discover whether they could used to send a rocket into space? Professor Saiful Islam is the Guinness World Record holder for the highest voltage from a fruit-based battery, but disappoints the team when he reveals they produce very little power. He used 3,000 of them and only managed a measly 2 Watts. Given that spaceships are famously difficult to get off the ground, it seems a lemon battery might just fail the acid test. Author Randall Munroe is undeterred and suggests…