What's Wrong With Lithium-Ion Batteries?

The announcement last month that 46 million Nokia-branded lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries made by Matsushita Battery Industrial could potentially short circuit and overheat was just the latest in a spate of product advisories and recalls of the technology over the past two years.
But it’s not as if Li-ion batteries are at the early point in their life cycle when you would expect these sorts of problems to crop up. Sony invented the technology back in 1990. So why is it failing now?
The theories behind the technology’s recent spotty performance are complex and varied, which makes fixing the problem a perplexing engineering challenge.
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