By Peter Weiss
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.