Imagine a battery that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times without ever corroding. A team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, recently has invented just that using a nanowire-based battery material.

This doesn't mean that we'll soon see such batteries on store shelves. The new research was intended to test nanowires and not a practical battery, research co-author Dr. Reginald Penner, chemistry professor at the university , told The Huffington Post on Friday.

The new battery technology, however, could edge us closer to possibly developing longer lasting commercial batteries for computers, smartphones, cars and spacecraft in the future.

"Scientists are interested in nanowires because they allow high power to be obtained, without reducing the total amount of energy that is stored," Penner said.

"But nanowires are fragile," he added. "Any corrosion or dissolution of the nanowire material leads very quickly to breakage of the nanowire, and a loss of its capacity -- which is bad. Our research is important because it demonstrates that a very simple modification to a battery or capacitor may allow nanowire electrode materials to last a lot longer, up to 40 times longer in our studies."

For the research, published in the journal Energy Letters on Wednesday, gold nanowires were coated with a manganese dioxide shell and encased in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The nanowires are each thousands of times thinner than a human hair.