MIT has come a long way towards building a possible new microbattery for future iPods, flashlights and automated PEZ dispensers. There are two neat things about this battery: it is incredibly small (smaller than a human cell) and it is built -- not by old-fashioned, unreliable robots -- but with custom-tailored polymer construction viruses.

If you have a bunch of spare time and an vast amount of scientific equipment on hand, you could build one yourself. All you have to do is get a clear, rubber-like material and start engraving a pattern of exceedingly small posts on it -- four or eight millionths of a metre should do the trick. Then throw a layer special polymers on top of these posts, that will act as a your battery's electrodes.

All done with those micro-posts? Great. Now get a hold of some handy gene-tailored viruses that make protein coats attracting cobalt oxide molecules -- and there you go, you now have an anode with mega-ultrathin wires.

Let's get those viruses to work! Lazy little creature they are...

Viola! There you go -- piece of cake. You are two thirds of the way towards a full battery. MIT professors Yet-Ming Chiang, Angela Belcher and Paula Hammond are currently working towards making the third missing component of the battery: the cathode. They plan to use those handy viruses again for that.

While these batteries are small, you'll need a bunch of them to power anything. But because they are so small, a bunch of them don't take up much room (which is nice.)

Many thousands of these batteries are between these tweezers

Building these batteries "does not involve any expensive equipment, and can be done at room temperature," Dr. Belcher was quoted as saying. So maybe this type of battery will be cost effective to build, when compared with traditional, 'old-school' batteries. We will have to wait a bunch of years to find out. But one advantage of using these virus-built batteries is that they "integrate [well] with biological organisms" -- which means, in other words, that things are looking up for cyborgs.

Good science leads to big smiles!