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Welcome to another initiative cool stuff ride home.

I'm Marcus Paffey's Reggie Rizzou on today's episode, why your next batteries

could be nuclear powered. Weird Wednesday has unwanted shirts, a long-lost postcard helps reunite

family and another orange lobster. Plus on this day in history, the first newspaper boy is

hired in New York City. That's all coming up on cool stuff.

Nuclear batteries. They sound like the stuff of science fiction or a joke out of the animated series

Futurama, but they're very much real and a part of the here and now. In fact, in some ways,

they're almost a thing of the past, too. Believe it or not, the technology has been

available since the 1950s. But with today's drive to electrify and decarbonize increasing,

the impetus to find emission-free power sources and reliable energy storage has also soared.

And with that, the Chinese startup Betavolt set out to create a modern version of the old technology.

For the rest of this story, we turn to author Luis Villazahn of BBC Science Focused.

In more recent times, nuclear batteries are those using the natural decay of radioactive material to create an electric current,

have been used in space applications or remote operations,

...