Forget faster chips—fit a jet engine to your laptop and watch it fly.
MIT research scientists are working on a turbine the size of a shirt button that
one day may power portable computers and mobile phones for hours on end. So far,
the researchers have made a 4-millimetre turbine wheel and the bearings the
wheel will sit on. Next comes the compressor and generator. Eventually, all the
components will be combined on a chip to make a generator that weighs less than
1 gram and produces more than 10 watts of electricity.
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