One Day, Your Phone Could Be Powered by 'Micro Windmills'

Imagine the disappointment if you ordered a windmill and it arrived in a box the size of a pea. But such so-called "micro-windmills" possibly could be a decent source of energy, if you jammed a couple hundred onto an electronic device and held it out to the breeze.

That's the odd vision of researchers who have designed a turbine so tiny that 10 can fit on a rice grain. (It's kind of the opposite of this guy.) Smitha Rao and J.-C. Chiao, both at the University of Texas at Arlington, wanted to offer a way to charge cell-phone batteries in areas where using wind power is impossible. So they built mills about 1.8 millimeters wide that theoretically can populate the sleeve of a phone. When your energy bar gets low, simply stick the device out the window at a gusty moment – or for those floating in the doldrums, just windmill your own arms frantically to generate an artificial gale.