Casio breaks new ground with its new polymer electrolyte fuel cell, the smallest yet developed. Small enough, in fact, to fit in the space allotted to conventional laptop batteries, but with the capability to power laptops for up to 16 hours at a time. There appears to be a sort of catch, though. The device uses hydrogen that is extracted from methanol, but because the extra extraction hardware requires pumps that would make it too large to fit in the confined space, that duty has been relegated to an external device. I’m not 100 percent positive about that, though, as the article is fairly is fairly confusing about what version of the fuel cell does what. Still, 16 hour battery life is nothing to sneeze at.
