Pinstripe Electricity: Novel fuel cell relies on thin, aqueous streams

As scientists increasingly realize, everyday materials tend to act weird at small scales. Microstreams of water, for instance, behave like viscous flows of honey.

Recently, a team of engineers and chemists found a way to exploit a consequence of that microscale sluggishness. The result, reports Paul A.J. Kenis of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a fuel cell that does away with a particularly troublesome and expensive component: the membrane usually needed to split the cell into two parts.