Belcher said. "We're also interested in integrating [the batteries] with biological organisms."
MIT engineers work toward cell-sized batteries
Microbatteries could power tomorrow's miniature devices
Elizabeth A. Thomson, News Office
August 20, 2008
Forget 9-volts, AAs, AAAs or D batteries: The energy for tomorrow's miniature electronic devices could come from tiny microbatteries about half the size of a human cell and built with viruses.
MIT engineers have developed a way to at once create and install such microbatteries -- which could one day power a range of miniature devices, from labs-on-a-chip to implantable medical sensors -- by stamping them onto a variety of surfaces.
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the week of Aug. 18, the team describes assembling and successfully testing two of the three key components of a battery. A complete battery is on its way.
[P6: Actually, complete batteries are here already.
Instead of physically arranging the component parts, researchers genetically engineer viruses to attract individual molecules of materials they're interested in, like cobalt oxide, from a solution, autonomously forming wires 17,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper that pack themselves together to form electrodes smaller than a human cell.
"Once you do the genetic engineering with the viruses themselves, you pour in the solution and they grow the right combination of these materials on them," Belcher says.
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